MTH – Mühltalhof 6.0 | AllesWirdGut Architektur ZT GmbH

A place that makes people and water go slow is home to a jewel of a retreat for culinary
hedonists: the Mühltalhof hotel and restaurant. The wish of one of the best chefs in the
country (Philip Rachinger) to upgrade and expand the kitchen of the sixth-generation
hospitality business prompted the renewed architectural expression of a family success story:
AllesWirdGut reinterprets Mühltalhof 6.0 as a collage of individual, finely tuned, and selfconsistent spaces and situations that always also appear as a coherent larger whole. So the
kitchen was moved into the center of the restaurant, the spa area on the garden floor was
expanded with formally reduced facilities and clearly reoriented to open to the garden and the
in-house riverside swimming area. The gentle conversion of Mühltalhof is based on the vision
of an entire hotel village of different special lodgings. At the same time, the design concept is
meandering through traces of the past, uncovering histories and respectfully transposing them
into the present time. The backbone of the spatial narrative is a long stone counter of local
chlorite gneiss that references the visual impression of forest, grass, and water. Inspired by
the idea of a market street, this twenty-meter-long piece of furniture guides hotel and
restaurant customers through the day—from reception desk to breakfast buffet, from the
drinks counter and kitchen pass to the ‘chef’s tables’ in the redesigned fireplace room.
Nuanced wood paneling frames the setting and adds to the overall impression of wellorganized
hospitality. The individual qualities of the existing restaurant rooms were reaccentuated to create a differentiated tripartite spatial setting: While the taproom still
breathes the atmosphere of the historical inn, the fully glazed veranda continues to offer
seating ina special place close by the water. The fireplace room, which is the Mühltalhof’s finedining area, looks both inward and outward: to the Große Mühl river flowing by and to the
futuristic new kitchenworkshop—including the open fire stove, glowing charcoal grill, and
bread-baking oven. Accordingly, the room was given a dimmed atmosphere with pitch-black
wall paneling and a coffered ceiling. The new Mühltalhof is all fired up from inside, you could
say, in light of yesterday shining into tomorrow, today.