Clara Mosswood bought the first plot in the autumn of 2016, when it was a collapsed barn and two acres of overgrown pasture at around 1,400 metres. She had spent the previous eight years working as a structural surveyor in the city, spending every spare weekend driving up to the mountains to rent other people's cabins. Most of them were fine. A few were genuinely good. But nearly all of them had the same gap: the owner was somewhere else, the instructions were laminated and generic, and if the boiler made a strange noise at 9 pm on a Saturday, you were on your own. She decided to build something she would actually want to stay in herself, and to be there when guests needed her.
The first cabin, which guests now call the Larch, opened in June 2017 after nine months of building. Clara did most of the interior work herself, including the kitchen joinery and the sleeping loft. The second cabin, the Spruce, followed in 2019 after a winter of planning and a spring of construction with two local carpenters, brothers named Tomas and Vik Halden, who have since become close friends of the place. The third cabin, the Fir, was finished in the difficult spring of 2021 and opened quietly that summer. Each one is slightly different in layout and character, because each one was built in a different season and with a different set of hands.
Clara Mosswood spent eight years as a structural surveyor before buying a collapsed barn at 1,400 metres in autumn 2016. She built the first cabin largely by hand, taught herself timber joinery over two winters, and opened Alpine Refuge in June 2017. Before that she had rented mountain cabins every spare weekend for years, taking notes on what worked and what didn't. She reads old mountaineering journals in the evenings, grows tomatoes badly, and believes that a well-stacked wood store is a form of hospitality. She lives ten minutes from the site with her partner Reuben and their dog, a large and unhelpful hound named Birch.