I don’t like holidays,” proclaims the French-Moroccan entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami, “but I love the mountains. I just want to go up, up, up!”
After selling Officine Universelle Buly, the 19th-century French beauty brand he relaunched with his wife, Victoire de Taillac-Touhami, two years ago, that appears to be the direction Touhami is headed. Since then, he has invested in various enterprises related to high-altitude living, among them the Drei Berge Hotel, a 19-room inn built in 1907 in Switzerland’s Bernese Alps. Touhami purchased the property last year and reopened this past summer, reimagining it with a series of quirky twists. While its red-and-white-chevron shutters are traditional, Touhami needed to get permission from everyone in Mürren (population 450), the tiny village where the inn is located, to paint the exterior pine green.
If Wes Anderson designed a members’ club, it might look like the interiors of Drei Berge: a colorful mix of intricate paneling and bespoke wooden furniture (such as the reception desk and beds), custom-made carpets and rugs (one in the lobby depicting surrounding mountains was inspired by Twin Peaks), and dozens of vintage travel posters. A collector of midcentury-modern furniture, Touhami decorated the rooms with pieces from designers “who loved the mountains,” like Charlotte Perriand and Carlo Mollino.
But Touhami also wanted to ensure that Drei Berge would be a place where guests could eat and sleep well, so he brought in his family’s personal chef, Ryutaro Kobayashi, to put a lighter spin on the typically heavy Alpine menu and furnished the rooms with bedding by luxury Italian linens company Beltrami.
Touhami, who has been traveling to Switzerland for more than two decades, decided to buy the property because he fell in love with the remote, car-free setting of Mürren, which is accessible only by cable car and electric train. In his opinion, the views of three mountains known as the Trois Bernoises are some of the most spectacular in the entire country.
“This is the region where Tolkien came to holiday in the early 1900s,” he says. Winter visitors can ski or snowboard on more than 30 miles of runs, and in the summer it’s a hiker’s fantasy, with about 125 miles of accessible trails.
Touhami’s ambition is to open five more alpine hotels over the next five years for “real hikers” in places like Sikkim, India, in the Eastern Himalayas, and Japan. More immediate, though, will be the launch of an outdoor clothing brand, also called Drei Berge, sometime next year. Expect “post-plastic-generation” luxury trekking gear made of 100 percent natural materials. “You can’t be someone who loves the mountains and at the same time hike with plastic products,” he says. “Drei Berge is for the punks of the mountains.” Especially ones who love high thread counts, monogrammed towels, and jaw-dropping vistas.