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SILVARA
Ridgelines of the Aldermere Valley dissolving into low cloud at first light

Arrive with nothing planned. The valley sets the pace, and it has never been in a hurry.

SILVARA

Aldermere Valley, Northern Range

A retreat in the Aldermere Valley — 1,840 m

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The house

Twenty-two rooms held between larch forest and still water.

Silvara was built into the north slope of the Aldermere Valley in 1911 as a sanatorium, on the then-current theory that altitude and silence were themselves a treatment. The theory was wrong in its particulars and right in its instinct.

We have kept the silence. Spring water still arrives at the bathhouse at forty-one degrees. There is one kitchen, one fire, and nothing on the property louder than the weather.

A mountain lake holding a perfect reflection of the ridge behind it

The lake is at its stillest twenty minutes before sunrise. Nobody has ever had to be told this twice.

From the guest book, 1974
The days here

Water, table, land.

Three registers, and not much else. A thermal bathhouse fed by the spring above the house, one kitchen cooking over wood, and ten thousand hectares of protected valley with guides who have spent their lives in it.

Every experience
Dark timber cabin standing among conifers in low light
Our story

A hundred and fourteen years of doing very little, carefully.

The valley has been under protection since 1963 and the house has changed hands three times in a century. Each owner has removed more than they added. We intend to continue that.