ALTO: A Family of Houses
About growing from one family hotel in Lana into a South Tyrolean network of houses, kitchens, gardens and people.
When I ask Klaus Dissertori how he knows whether a building could become one of their places, he does not begin with square metres, room counts or feasibility studies. We are sitting at Hotel Schwarzschmied in Lana, the house where the story started, and he talks instead about entering a building and feeling something.
Sometimes, he says, you simply sense an energy. And if you are not sure, perhaps it is better not to do it. The second requirement is imagination. He remembers walking through buildings that other hotel operators had already dismissed. The 1477 Reichhalter before its renovation was one of them; so was the Parkhotel Mondschein in Bolzano. You had to be able to look beyond what was there and imagine the life that might return.
This seems a useful way into the world that Klaus and his brother Moritz have gradually assembled under the name ALTO. Because taken individually, their houses can be described quite easily. A family-run hotel among the vineyards. An old inn with eight rooms. A villa in a garden. A historic city hotel and park. A mountain farm high in the Ultental.
Taken together, they reveal something more interesting.
Not a hotel formula, exactly.
A way of looking at places.
© Letizia Cigliutti
The mother house
Klaus calls Schwarzschmied the Mutterhaus. His parents, Sieglinde and Siegfried Dissertori, built the hotel in 1981 on a site whose name reaches further back, to the blacksmith of the former Schwarzbauer farm. Decades later, after time away from South Tyrol, Klaus returned to the family business — but only, as he tells me, under the condition that he could rethink it.
What followed was not a single transformation but a sequence of additions, alterations and corrections. The house has been repeatedly remodelled since the middle of the 2010s, gaining new rooms, garden areas and a clearer relationship between architecture, food, art, wellbeing and the landscape immediately around it.
That incremental quality matters. Schwarzschmied was not conceived from scratch as the first chapter of a hospitality group. It was a family hotel before it was a concept. The later language grew out of something already being lived.
One of the relationships that emerged here has since become a thread through several ALTO houses. Klaus first worked with Christina Biasi-von Berg of Studio Biquadra around 2014, initially on the Schwarzschmied garden. The collaboration continued through later projects, giving ALTO something more subtle than a corporate design identity: a designer who knows the hosts, their habits, their references and the architecture they are prepared to leave alone.
At Schwarzschmied, this appears in locally made furniture, regional woods and stone, work by South Tyrolean designers such as Harry Thaler, and art by Klaus’s cousin Hannes Egger. Biquadra designed furniture specifically for the hotel, produced by a local carpenter; wool rugs were handwoven nearby.
But the building is only part of the picture. Outside are vineyards, the old Schwarzbauergarten, a pool and lawn, terraces that blur the boundary between hotel and garden. Inside, people come for yoga, food, talks, art, treatments or simply a drink.
The place has edges.
They are intentionally porous.
Schwarzschmied and the pool Schwarzschmied natural materials The Potato by Hannes Egger
When houses begin finding you
The next chapters did not arrive according to a five-year growth plan. In 2017, the owner of an old building in the centre of Lana approached Klaus. The house had already lived several lives. First documented in 1477, it had been a mill, a coffee house, a butcher’s shop and an inn. Klaus had long imagined making a small restaurant of this kind. Suddenly there was a building in which to try.
1477 Reichhalter opened in 2018 with eight rooms above a café and restaurant. Architect Zeno Bampi worked with the historic structure; Christina Biasi-von Berg shaped the interiors. Old floors, walls and traces were allowed to remain visible beside found furniture and newer interventions. The rooms were named after former owners and trades once associated with the building.
More important than the rooms, perhaps, is what happens downstairs. The Reichhalter returned to one of the oldest forms of hospitality: the inn as a room belonging partly to the town. There is coffee in the morning, lunch, aperitivo, dinner. In summer, tables extend beneath the vine-covered terrace. A wooden bench sits by the street. Locals do not have to negotiate the psychological border of a hotel lobby before deciding whether they belong.
Klaus tells me the restaurant worked almost immediately and has remained intensely used throughout the day. It proved that a very small house could carry a surprisingly large social life.
1477 Reichhalter Café 1477 Reichhalter Room 1477 Reichhalter Keys
The villa they kept asking about
Villa Arnica took longer. Klaus had been interested in the property for years, making approaches without success. Then, after Reichhalter had opened, its owner contacted him. The villa had stood largely unused for around three decades.
This time, the task was less about negotiating an existing hotel operation and more about imagining how an old pension might begin again. Built around 1925 and run as a guesthouse from the 1960s, Villa Arnica still carried an atmosphere somewhere between private home and holiday pension. The new intervention retained original furniture and architectural elements while Biquadra added floral wallpapers, marble, linen and carefully sourced pieces.
Its real architecture, however, may be the garden. There is the old pool, a pool house, fruit trees, flowers, a glasshouse used for yoga and the feeling that the villa belongs as much to its planted ground as to its walls.
Adjacent to it lies the Arnica Acker, roughly 3,000 square metres under cultivation. Produce from here does not stop at the garden gate: it moves through the kitchens of the other ALTO houses too. That small logistical detail says quite a lot. The houses are individual, but they are not isolated. They lend one another gardens, kitchens, people, ideas and infrastructure.
Villa Arnica Rooms Villa Arnica Yoga Villa Arnica Acker
Two brothers, different ways home
By then, another element was changing. Moritz Dissertori was considering returning to South Tyrol. Like Klaus, he had left before coming back. Moritz studied business administration in Munich, London and Hong Kong, later worked at UBS and was involved in the development of hospitality brands including Casa Cook, Cook’s Club and Bold Hotels.
Today, the brothers run ALTO together.
That outside experience matters.
ALTO is often presented through the appealing visual shorthand of South Tyrol: old houses, orchards, mountains, linen, stone, wine. But the brothers’ reference field is wider. Klaus tells me about travelling through Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Switzerland and elsewhere, looking closely at hospitality, interiors and ways people gather. These journeys fed into the projects back home.
The regional quality of the houses therefore does not come from sealing them off from external influences. It comes from filtering those influences through a very specific place.
Villa Arnica Bar 1477 Reichhalter Wine Cooler Schwarzschmied Balcony
A hotel in the city
When Moritz returned, the brothers began looking for another property. This time they were searching deliberately. They viewed several. Nothing quite worked.
Then came Parkhotel Mondschein.
The historic hotel stands in the centre of Bolzano, entered from the urban fabric yet set within an unexpectedly generous park. Parts of the building reach back to the fourteenth century; later additions brought another layer of nineteenth-century hospitality architecture. When ALTO reopened it in 2022, Biquadra worked with precisely those accumulated periods rather than forcing the building into a single historical moment.
It is larger than Reichhalter or Arnica, yet the interesting move is similar.
Again, the hotel does not end at reception.
The Luna Bar and Restaurant face outward. The arise body-and-mind studio welcomes people who are not staying at the hotel. The park hosts concerts, film nights, natural-wine gatherings, artist talks and other events conceived as much for Bolzano as for visitors.
More recently, ALTO Pizza added another deliberately simple social format: pizza, natural wine, craft beer and long evenings in a historic parlour and courtyard within the Mondschein world.
The point is not the number of concepts.
It is that each provides another reason to enter without needing a room key.
Parkhotel Mondschein View Parkhotel Mondschein Bar Parkhotel Mondschein Pool
A family resemblance without a uniform
Walking through the ALTO houses, there is an obvious family resemblance. But it is surprisingly difficult to reduce it to a palette or a list of materials. They are not clones.
Reichhalter is compact, almost compressed into the town.
Villa Arnica opens slowly into its garden.
Schwarzschmied stretches towards vines, pool and landscape.
Mondschein turns towards an urban park.
The consistency comes from somewhere else.
Klaus describes how, starting with Reichhalter, the team began thinking about projects as complete worlds: not simply architecture and interiors, but typography, wording, clothing, food, music, art and the way staff would inhabit the concept. This could easily become the most tedious form of branding — every napkin obediently following a brand manual. At its best here, it works in the opposite direction. The details are coherent enough to disappear. And the long collaboration with people such as Christina Biasi-von Berg is crucial. Her work connects Schwarzschmied, Reichhalter, Villa Arnica and Mondschein, but each time the existing building sets different rules.
What ALTO seems to have understood is that authorship does not require everything to look the same. It requires enough continuity between the people making decisions.
Parkhotel Mondschein Tableware Schwarzschmied La Fucina Menu 1477 Reichhalter Table Setting
The people make the feeling
There is another consistency that is much harder to photograph. The teams. Across repeated visits, this has been one of the things I have noticed most. Staff do not appear to have been briefed only on procedures. They know where they work. They can tell you something about the house, the food, the idea behind a room or an event. They are alert without becoming formal, friendly without turning hospitality into performance.
When I ask Klaus how they manage to find people like this across several houses, his answer is strikingly pragmatic. ALTO has vacancies throughout the year. They look at a lot of applications. Technical skills matter, of course, but he is more interested in whether someone understands what the house is trying to do. At Reichhalter, he says, it is ultimately more important that a person understands the concept and possesses a basic instinct for friendliness than that they already know exactly how a plate should be placed on a table. The latter can be taught. The former is harder. It sounds almost obvious. In hospitality, it is not.
A hotel can have beautifully restored floors, good typography and expensive furniture and still feel completely lifeless. As Klaus puts it, the feeling of a hotel comes largely from the people inside it. That includes guests. But also colleagues, partners, friends, neighbours and the familiar faces who keep returning.
Friends, family, neighbours
Klaus uses the word community without making it sound like a marketing category. It seems to mean something closer to an extended circle. Friends come to events. Regional producers become collaborators. Locals enter for dinner. Artists stay and work. A yoga class draws people who live nearby. Somebody comes for pizza rather than for a weekend away. The architecture supports this.
At Schwarzschmied, the garden, restaurant and programme create overlap.
At Reichhalter, the ground floor belongs almost visibly to the street.
At Villa Arnica, the scale becomes more intimate, but its garden and agricultural ground feed a network extending beyond the villa itself.
At Mondschein, the park forms an urban room.
Each property contains both retreat and opening.
This may be one of ALTO’s more interesting contributions to the current hotel landscape. Privacy does not have to mean isolation. And a hotel does not become local simply because the menu says where the cheese was made. Sometimes locality begins with giving neighbours a reason to walk through the door.
1477 Reichhalter Gasthaus Schwarzschmied La Fucina Villa Arnica Tavolata
Food as connective tissue
Food runs through all of this. At Schwarzschmied, the old Schwarzbauergarten, around 1,000 square metres in size, supplies fruit, herbs and vegetables. The larger Arnica Acker extends that production and feeds all four established ALTO houses.
At La Fucina, chef Andreas Pircher works within a culinary framework that has outlasted individual chefs: seasonal produce, a strong vegetable focus and relationships with nearby farmers and producers. Bread, goat’s cheese, butter, honey, coffee and other ingredients are sourced through a web of regional suppliers, while pasta is made in-house.
At Reichhalter, eating is inseparable from the identity of the house. Breakfast becomes lunch, lunch turns into aperitivo and the room changes again at dinner.
Mondschein translates that social quality into a city hotel, through Luna and now ALTO Pizza.
Even wine has begun to operate across the group. ALTO works with the biodynamic Kränzelhof in nearby Tscherms/Cermes on its own wines, which then circulate through the houses.
None of these elements is particularly radical in isolation. The interesting part is how they connect. The garden is not merely a hotel garden. It becomes a supplier. A restaurant is not only an amenity. It becomes a meeting point. The kitchen is not an enclosed department. It is one of the ways a house reaches into the region around it.
1477 Reichhalter Gasthaus Farm To Table Healthy Snacks
Lana, beyond the hotel gate
This matters particularly in Lana. For a visitor, it would be easy to imagine Schwarzschmied, Villa Arnica and Reichhalter as a carefully arranged little ALTO village. They are not.
Lana was already a working place with its own tourism, agriculture, trades, shops and social structures long before these houses acquired their current forms. Klaus is quite clear about this. He does not claim ALTO transformed the town. Lana, he says, had long been comparatively active and forward-looking in tourism. What he does think is that one new place can raise expectations for another. Somebody opens a good restaurant. Another house follows. The level shifts slightly. And gradually a place acquires more reasons to stay in its centre rather than leave it.
What Klaus wants now is not necessarily another ALTO property on the next street. He talks instead about what Lana still lacks: independent shops, a bakery, another bar, more young people prepared to take the risk of starting something themselves. He even tries to connect interesting people with available properties when he hears about them. That may be a more useful definition of hospitality entrepreneurship than another hotel opening. Not owning the whole neighbourhood. Wanting the neighbourhood around you to become better.
ALTO’s own description is revealing: Klaus and Moritz say they are creating the neighbourhoods in which they themselves would like to live. The ambition becomes convincing only if other people remain free to shape them too.
Lana Apples Lana Backificio Lana Farmhouse
From town to mountain
The latest addition shifts the geography again. Grubern Gut sits at around 1,500 metres in the Ultental, far removed from the easy social traffic of Lana or Bolzano. The farm dates back to 1423. Here, the premise is almost the reverse of Mondschein.
There is no need to create another urban meeting place. The appeal is distance itself. The restored mountain farm is conceived for a small number of guests and largely self-catered stays, with local products and shared spaces rather than the full choreography of a hotel. Current descriptions place capacity at around fourteen guests.
Klaus had felt for some time that something was missing from the collection. After a few days in Lana or Bolzano, he imagined going higher — somewhere with less service, fewer decisions, almost nothing demanding attention. When they saw this farm, he says, the energy was immediately there.
Again that word.
For all the strategic thinking that has accumulated around ALTO, the projects still seem to begin with an instinctive response to a building and its surroundings. Grubern Gut is perhaps the clearest expression of that. Not another hotel category. A gap in their own way of travelling that they wanted to fill.
How large can a small cosmos become?
There is, inevitably, a tension here. ALTO is no longer simply two brothers making tiny houses in Lana. It is a hospitality group. There are more rooms, more employees, more systems and more projects. And the larger it becomes, the harder it is to maintain precisely the informal quality that made the early houses interesting. Klaus does not pretend otherwise.
During our conversation, he tells me about another project already in planning: a considerably larger hotel dating from the 1960s, within reach of Venice, which the group intends to comprehensively rebuild. The current target is an opening in 2028. When I ask whether the same regional microcosm can simply be recreated at another destination, he hesitates. Not entirely. Large hotels work differently. The aspiration remains — a local chef, a meaningful relationship with architecture, people from the place — but scale changes the rules.
That hesitation is worth preserving. Because the interesting question for ALTO is no longer whether Klaus and Moritz can recognise another building with potential. They clearly can. It is whether the network of trust that gives their smaller houses coherence can expand without becoming a formula.
Whether a design collaboration can remain a conversation rather than a template.
Whether staff can still understand a place rather than merely learn a brand.
Whether the door remains genuinely open to neighbours once the operation behind it grows larger.
The house before the concept
Back at Schwarzschmied, the story still appears surprisingly modest.
A hotel built by their parents.
A son who came home and wanted to change it.
A designer who first worked on the garden and stayed for the next projects.
An old inn whose owner happened to ask the right person.
A villa that had waited for years.
A brother looking for a reason to return.
A city hotel that somehow felt right when they walked inside.
A mountain farm added because something quieter was missing.
Looking backwards, it resembles a strategy. Listening to Klaus tell it, it sounds much more like a sequence of encounters. That may explain why the houses still retain distinct characters. ALTO has developed a vocabulary, certainly. There are shared collaborators, recurring materials, gardens, art, yoga, food, wine and a recognisable visual sensibility. But the stronger connection is less visible. It lies in the belief that a building is only the beginning.
People have to want to be there.
A kitchen needs relationships beyond its door.
A garden must grow something or offer somewhere to sit.
The neighbour should occasionally have a reason to enter.
And the staff member placing a plate on the table should understand why this house exists in the first place.
To me that is what Klaus means when he talks about energy. Not something mystical waiting inside an empty building. The ability to look at a place and imagine the lives that might one day gather there.
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The ALTO Cosmos
Hosts_Klaus and Moritz Dissertori / ALTO Hotel Group
Origin_Sieglinde and Siegfried Dissertori / Hotel Schwarzschmied
Mother house_Hotel Schwarzschmied, Lana
Interior architecture_Christina Biasi-von Berg / Studio Biquadra
Architecture / 1477 Reichhalter_Zeno Bampi
Art_Hannes Egger, Jasmine Deporta and changing artists in residence
Product design_Harry Thaler and regional makers
Kitchen / Schwarzschmied_Andreas Pircher / La Fucina
Garden to table_Schwarzbauergarten and Arnica Acker
Wine_ALTO × Kränzelhof
Eat & Sleep_1477 Reichhalter, Lana
Suites & Garden_Villa Arnica, Lana
Hotel & Park_Parkhotel Mondschein, Bolzano
Food & city life_Luna Restaurant, Luna Bar, ALTO Pizza
Body & Mind_arise Studios, Lana and Bolzano
Mountain retreat_Grubern Gut, Ultental
Photography & image-making_changing collaborators across the houses
Next thread_a new, larger hospitality project towards the Adriatic
Further Threads
Christina Biasi-von Berg / Studio Biquadra
The quiet design thread connecting several ALTO houses without making them look alike.
Art, family and the cultural life of Lana, from the figure of the old blacksmith to contemporary interventions.
South Tyrolean product design and the point where local craft meets a more international design language.
The Schwarzbauergarten
A seventeenth-century garden functioning not only as scenery but as part of the kitchen.
Following vegetables from a field beside one hotel into the kitchens of several others.
Biodynamic wine, landscape and one of the producers extending the ALTO network beyond its own properties.
Lana
A working market town between orchards and vines, and the question of what independent hospitality can contribute without turning a place into its own resort.
Bolzano beyond the hotel
Museion, Lido di Bolzano, TonHaus, old arcades and the cultural network surrounding Parkhotel Mondschein.
The inn as public room
From the centuries-old 1477 Reichhalter to ALTO Pizza: why food may be the easiest way for a hotel to belong to its neighbourhood.
Grubern Gut / Ultental
What changes when hospitality leaves the town behind and becomes almost entirely about landscape, self-sufficiency and retreat.
The people behind the feeling
Staff as authors of atmosphere rather than anonymous service infrastructure.
