English outdoor enthusiasts and German intellectuals like Hermann Hesse and Friedrich Nietzsche flocked there around the turn of the last century, escaping cities that were growing dirtier and denser. But it was the Niarchos and Agnelli families in the s who would give the ski resort its contemporary social profile. Moritz menthols. So far, so Gstaadβbut there is a crucial difference between the two moneyed Swiss enclaves.
Native talents like the 19th-century painter Giovanni Segantini, 20th-century sculptor Alberto Giacometti, and 21st-century polymath Not Vital are more likely to come up in conversation than the latest arm candy of multimillionaire Saint Moritz scenester Arun Nayar. Susanne Thun has been coming to Engadine since the early s, when she and her husband, the architect and Memphis group designer Matteo Thun, bought two adjoined duplex apartments in Celerina. The facades are festooned with decorative botanical and mythical etchings called sgraffito, and from the outside many of them seem interchangeable.
Most are attractive in an unassuming way, built for the farmers, brewers, and confectioners that populated the valley before the hotels opened their doors. Venture inside for a chat with some of the owners, however, and the similarity ends. In fact, home is a relatively modest compound in the middle of the quiet town of Silvaplana.
A pair of medium-size Peter Beard photographs are the only serious art on the living room walls. Nature helps the mind, the skin, everything.
For most of the year, the couple is based in Capri and Milan, where social and professional life is more demanding. The results, at least, are copaceticβand cozy in the extreme. Further proof that the Riminis are eaters: enough blue-and-white vintage Blue Willow china to serve an army. Her father-in-law is Cesare Rimini, a lawyer, writer, and intellectual. Before buying and restoring the Jugendstil villa in , the soft-spoken mother of one worked variously as a ski instructor in her native Saint Moritz, a makeup artist, an art director for German Elle, and running the Monica De Cardenas gallery, in Zuoz.
