Chalets are not uncommon in the city of Lausanne. There are still around sixty remaining in the municipal territory, including in its fairground areas. How did they arrive in an urban environment, what is their history? Answers with the municipal archivist Charline Dekens who looked into the subject.
“It was on a personal initiative that I wanted to know why there were chalets in Lausanne and try to understand how we went from the alpine chalet to the city chalet,” Charline Dekens explains to Keystone-ATS. “How’s the cottage?” also became a cultural event for secondary school students last January.
If their stories are different and varied, there was at one point, towards the end of the 19th century, a phenomenon of “chaletization”, a “fashion effect”. Ms. Dekens evokes “a link between cities and mountains, witness to a taste for the chalet, wood, wood fire, comfort, the ‘refuge’ side and the relationship with nature”.
With also this possibility of “buying your villa at an affordable price, thanks to local companies marketing partly prefabricated chalets”, she adds.
A novel propels fashion
A little flashback. Cottage? The word originates from French-speaking Switzerland, attested from the 14th century and designating wooden and/or stone constructions, in the Alps and the Pre-Alps to shelter those who take care of livestock and make cheese in the summer. “Nothing to do with the traditional Swiss house par excellence as one might believe abroad,” underlines the municipal archivist.
“The very first pre-existing chalets in a peri-urban environment, which no longer exist today, were outbuildings found in certain gardens of wealthy properties,” says Ms. Dekens. Main characteristics of the Swiss-style chalet: a stone base above which rises a plank floor, a gable roof overhanging widely and decorative elements in cut wood.
It is a book which propelled an idealized image of the chalet among the first literate and wealthy tourists in Europe, who projected onto Switzerland and the beauty of its landscapes a society in harmony with nature, free and democratic, continues -She. This is the novel “Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse – Letters from two lovers living in a small town at the foot of the Alps” by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published in 1761.
The trend began and spread from the 19th century, particularly among British and American tourists, fascinated by the peasant houses of the Bernese Oberland, the most popular region during the Enlightenment and Romanticism era. Back home, they began building chalets on their properties.
The mini-village of Sauvabelin
The “chalet style” was born. More and more of them are being built outside Switzerland and mountain regions, in the countryside or by the sea. With a boomerang return, Switzerland is taking over the stereotypical image of the chalet to to make “the symbol of an authentic national architecture”. It will be popularized by the representations of “Swiss villages” at the National Exhibition in Geneva in 1896 and at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900.
Directly inspired by these exhibitions, Lausanne saw its own village built on the edge of the Sauvabelin woods, to the north of the city, in 1898-99. This idea comes from a certain Charles Pflüger (1848-1927), owner of the store “Bazar vaudois” and who is part of the committee of the Lausanne Development Company, according to the archives. It was he who had the artificial lake of Sauvabelin built in 1889, as well as a restaurant near it in 1891.
He also decided to have around ten chalets of different types installed on his property “Le Feuillage”, to which he added ten years later a chalet-pension, which still remains today, route du Signal 27, explains Charline Dekens.
A fashion that is running out of steam
The people of Lausanne seem seduced by this Alpine atmosphere at the gates of the city: the village becomes a popular place for walks, made easily accessible thanks to the Signal funicular inaugurated in 1899. An advertising poster from the time also praises Sauvabelin as being a “climacteric station”, a sort of “mountain refuge”.
From 1910, the appeal of the chalet continued to grow among many Lausanne residents, like many other city dwellers elsewhere. The only caveat of the municipal authorities at the time: to respect the rules of protection against fires. But otherwise, nothing stands in the way of their construction in the city. Prefabricated chalets are popular, comfortable and financially accessible.
Thus, from the chalet adorning the garden of a mansion on the edge of the lake in the 19th century, we moved to the “chalet-villa” which we live all year round and mostly around the city center. Then, the chalet fashion will gradually decline. We will still see modest “weekend chalets” built in fairground areas, concludes Ms. Dekens.
This article was automatically published. Source: ats
