Alpine Vernacular

The chalet is the main Alpine house type: a timber building with a heavy, gently sloping roof whose wide eaves extend well beyond the walls and rest on brackets. The roof ridge usually runs from front to back, so the main facade is the gable end. Walls are of squared logs stacked horizontally, often above a stone ground floor. Wooden balconies run across the front and sides, and gables, window frames and railings are commonly carved or painted. Some farms also had small windowless storehouses, called mazots in French-speaking areas, for valuables.

The Grand Chalet in Rossinière, Switzerland, built 1752-1756 for the cheese merchant Jean-David Henchoz, was later the home of the painter Balthus. The Ballenberg open-air museum near Brienz holds more than 100 rural buildings moved from regions across Switzerland. Outside the Alps, the Schweizerhaus in Klein Glienicke, Berlin (1867), by Ferdinand von Arnim, and the Kviknes Hotel in Balestrand, Norway (1894), copy the chalet form.

The chalet developed over several centuries in the mountain valleys of Switzerland, Savoy, Austria and Bavaria, without a single originator. The word comes from the Arpitan dialects of western Switzerland and Savoy, where it first meant a herder's hut. Many chalets were seasonal dairy farms: herders lived in them through the summer, making butter and cheese from cattle brought up from the lowland pastures, and left them empty in winter.

From the late 18th century, Romantic garden design brought copies of the chalet into the lowlands, and in the 19th century the Alpine tourist trade turned chalets into holiday homes. The Swiss chalet style, with wide eaves, exposed brackets, carved ornament and balconies, spread to Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and North America. In the United States, a Swiss Chalet Revival of the early 1900s ran alongside the Arts and Crafts movement; the Bomante House in Cleveland (1905) is one example. Ballenberg opened in 1978 to preserve rural Swiss buildings.