Studio Karhard Takes Club Culture to the Swiss Alps with Play at Chalet African, Gstaad.

By now, Studio Karhard has demonstrated a rare and consistent ability to carry its club DNA into almost any spatial typology without losing the plot. We’ve seen it in a nightclub-inspired Berlin apartment and a dentist practice stripped of every clinical cliché. Now, the Berlin-based studio founded by Alexandra Erhard and Thomas Karsten has transported that same energy—raw, precise, emotionally charged—to the Swiss Alps.

Play is a 300-square-metre club space embedded within Chalet African, an extraordinary private chalet in Gstaad conceived by creative director Nachson Mimran and Pritzker Prize–winning architect Francis Kéré. The chalet unfolds across three thematic zones—Regenerate, Think, and Play—each shaped by a different cast of collaborators. Studio Karhard was handed the most kinetic of the three: a hybrid club landscape complete with dancefloor, DJ booth, bar, fireplace lounge, bowling alley, and billiard table.

Perfect Playlist of Light & Materiality: Space Talk Listening Bar in London.

At Space Talk listening bar, sound isn't just heard—it's seen and felt. EBBA and Charlotte Taylor have crafted a honey-toned, homely interior where acoustic engineering meets aesthetic excellence.

What makes Play interesting is its framing. Studio Karhard describes the space not as a private disco but as “a spatial infrastructure for collective experience”—a nocturnal laboratory where architecture, light, and sound operate as a single mutable instrument. The brief demanded flexibility across a wide spectrum: surround-sound cinema screenings, intimate listening sessions, and full club nights with a high-performance sound system. Rather than designing for a fixed scenario, the studio orchestrated a field of tension between intimacy and excess that can be dialled up or down depending on the occasion.

Materiality is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Club-tested surfaces—robust, tactile, built to withstand—sit alongside islands of precision lighting and graphic accents that reference African art and ornamentation without tipping into pastiche. The alpine shell of the chalet is deliberately subverted from within; in place of rustic timber and folksy clichés, a contemporary, Afro-futurist atmosphere emerges. The stacked leather benches wrapping the dancefloor, the dark checkerboard tiles of the DJ booth, the constellation of circular pendant lamps overhead—these elements read as both technoid and warm, which is exactly the kind of contradiction Studio Karhard does best.

Volcanic Volumes: Gota in Madrid by Plantea Estudio.

Madrid’s Justicia barrio is a glittering tapestry of swish boutiques, neoclassical buildings, nightclubs, bistros and tapas bars, of which most are remarkably modern in design. Plantea Estudio’s latest project is the exception.

The artwork woven through Play is equally considered. The DJ booth is the work of designer Ousmane Mbaye, a wall painting in the bowling alley by Victor Ekpuk, and a pendant lamp in the staircase by Ini Archibong—all artists with African backgrounds, reinforcing the cross-continental dialogue that runs through the entire Chalet African project.

What Studio Karhard keeps proving with each new project is that genuine creative range isn’t about adapting a signature aesthetic to different briefs. It’s about reading each context with precision and building something that couldn’t exist anywhere else.

Tucked inside a Kéré-designed chalet in the Swiss Alps, Play is about as far from Berghain as it gets. And yet the intelligence is unmistakable.

Bonnie Bar & Restaurant in Paris by Jordane Arrivetz.

There is a bit of Studio 54 in this Parisian temple of the night where the evenings promise to be as stunning as the view.

[Images courtesy of Studio Karhard. Interior Design by Studio Karhard (Alexandra Erhard & Thomas Karsten) with Jannick Naumann, Anna Liu, and Valeriya Sidorenko. Soundsystem by H.A.N.D. Light programming by Room Division. Photography by Robert Rieger.]