There is a new place to swim in the Austrian Alps, and it is 900 square metres of it, on a roof, above a valley.
Hotel Lürzerhof, a family-run resort in the village of Untertauern in Salzburgerland, has reopened after a €10 million expansion — the largest single project in a history that stretches back to a roadside restaurant built in the early 1950s. The work, designed by Salzburg interior architects Köck + Bachler, added two entire floors to the building.
The one that will get photographed is the fifth. It is adults-only, spans roughly 900sqm, and is built around a 20-metre cantilevered infinity pool that projects out over the mountainside so that the water appears to end in open air. Around it sit a Finnish panorama sauna, an organic panorama sauna, an infrared salt dome, an aroma steam bath, two panoramic relaxation rooms and a tea lounge, arranged around a glass atrium that pulls daylight down into the centre of the floor.
Below that, the new fourth floor is given over to rooms. Six suites and two additional rooms bring the hotel to 68 keys, done in a contemporary alpine register — floor-to-ceiling glazing, deep terraces, spa-influenced bathrooms. The top-tier Sky Suites go further, with private panorama saunas, outdoor whirlpools and their own wellness areas, which is to say you need not leave your room to have the view and the heat at the same time.
The older spa has been reworked alongside the new build: a redesigned wellness reception and lounge, two more treatment rooms and a set of new signature rituals. Counting everything, Lürzerhof now has 4,500sqm of spa.
What is quietly more unusual is what powers it. The resort describes itself as climate-positive and generates more than ten times its own energy requirement from a private hydroelectric plant, running without fossil fuels via a combination of biomass heating and renewables. The new floors carry green roofs, energy-efficient glazing and materials chosen for low environmental impact. A hotel that adds a heated rooftop pool and a half-dozen saunas without adding a fossil-fuel bill is a rarer thing than the marketing suggests.
The setting does a lot of the work. Untertauern sits at the foot of the Tauern Pass in the Radstädter Tauern mountains, a few minutes from the Obertauern ski area and about an hour’s drive from Salzburg airport, with a ski bus stopping outside the door in winter and hiking trails in summer.
Owner Christina Habersatter, who runs the hotel with her family, said it was important that after the largest development in its history Lürzerhof should still feel like Lürzerhof — that the warmth and personal service, and the hotel’s relationship with what surrounds it, come through unchanged. The mountains, she noted, were always the thing guests loved most; the point of the new floors is that you can no longer look anywhere else.
