Three Generations, One Nervy Brief: Hannes Peer Reimagines Merano’s Aurora Hotel.

When Hannes Peer delivered four Milan installations in four different materials for four different brands this year, our editor, Dana Tomić Hughes, called it the most ambitious material-led practice in the city. Aurora is what that appetite looks like when it’s handed a building, a budget and three generations of family history.

The hotel has anchored Merano’s tree-lined Passer Promenade for almost sixty years under the Aukenthaler family. Siblings Melanie and Philipp, the third generation, inherited the 59-room property and handed Peer a brief with unusual nerve—don’t erase, amplify. Finish what was started six decades ago.

Phase one covers every guest-facing floor, 18 redesigned rooms, a new Listening Bar and, with Vienna collective Feld72, an aluminium outer skin that wraps the building at varying depths and widths, throwing back light differently depending on the hour and the season.

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Inside, the material argument gets serious quickly. A ceramic work Peer conceived with Officine Saffi runs to more than 2,000 handmade tiles across thirty-odd tonalities. Terrazzo cast from local stone carries the promenade indoors. A Murano glass chandelier by 6:AM hangs above Rier’s curved, mahogany-toned reception desk, and a concrete bas-relief titled Horizon, by South Tyrolean artist Ursula Huber—Peer’s mother—brings brutalist weight to the lobby.

The lounge borrows its porousness from John Lautner’s Sheats–Goldstein Residence: travertine underfoot, a central fireplace, horizontal timber blinds slicing the light. Off it, the Listening Bar drops into Pompeian red, deep-pile carpet, smoked mirrors and tangerine cherrywood—Gabriella Crespi’s language, with a hi-fi system buried inside custom dark walnut so that nothing announces itself. It also houses Carte Blanche, an evolving art platform curated by Eva Ingram Harpf.

Sheats Goldstein House by John Lautner in LA, Photographed by Tom Ferguson.

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The guest rooms are deliberately the quiet part. Between 25 and 30 square metres, they run from Palm Springs modernism to Alpine rationalism, a pagoda ceiling introducing just enough theatre. Open bathrooms carved from local stone soften the edges between sleeping and bathing, closer to Lautner’s Elrod House than to any hotel formula.

Downstairs, Artè keeps the 1970s interiors the family commissioned from South Tyrolean carpenter Herbert Kinkelin—sculptural brass dividers, integrated planters, high-relief plaster—restored rather than replaced. Which is the whole project in miniature.

Phase two, with a rooftop pool and 41 further rooms, lands in 2028. Alpine restraint has rarely looked this unrestrained.

Signor Lievito Bakery in Milan by Hannes Peer.

Inside this petite bakery, Hannes Peer maximised the use of space by making everything made to measure and integrated into the architecture—from the layout to the furnishings.

[Photography by Giulio Ghirardi.]