05
Hotel History
W7SKY – The Living History of a Place
The story of W7SKY begins long before design, long before hospitality, long before the idea of a boutique design hotel.
Five generations. One house.
The house was built around 1890 – at a time when the Weissensee region was shaped almost entirely by agriculture, forestry and craftsmanship.
It was never conceived as a representational villa.
It was a working home — a place where life, labor and landscape existed inseparably.
For more than a century, the building has remained in the hands of the same family, shaped across five generations by a deeply rooted tradition in timber construction and carpentry — a craft for which the family became widely known throughout the valley. Wood was never just a material here — it was identity, livelihood and culture.
Alongside the house, a carpentry workshop grew, forming roofs, boathouses and wooden structures across the entire Weissensee region.
The First Hostess – Long Before Tourism
Even before the First World War, the house had already begun to open quietly.
Stephanie, the grandmother of the current owner, recognized the spirit and potential of this place long before “tourism” even existed as a concept at Weissensee.
During the summer months, she began renting out rooms and living spaces to early summer visitors and city guests. Without any marketing concept.
Only with foresight, hospitality, and an instinctive understanding of what people longed for:
silence, nature, simplicity.
With this, she laid the foundation for what later became a long-standing family guesthouse — and eventually W7SKY.
The years of war and displacement interrupted this continuity. Like so many families in Europe, they were forced to leave — and to return after the war.
Before it was ever officially a pension, it was already a place of welcome.
After the Second World War, the house adapted to a new reality.
What had once been purely a home and workplace became a small, family-run guesthouse — Pension Villastoff.
For decades, it welcomed summer guests at the lake.
Erika, the mother of the present owner, ran this pension with the same entrepreneurial spirit that had defined the men of the family in carpentry before her.
From Family Home to Pension Villastoff
While father and grandfather built with wood, she built relationships — through warmth, generosity, love of life, travel, and an open heart.
In doing so, she followed directly in the footsteps of Stephanie — as the second generation of women who gave this house its own feminine strength and sense of hospitality.
The historical photographs tell this story more powerfully than words ever could:
A quiet avant-garde attitude.
A modernity far ahead of its time.
A calm, confident way of life that still lingers in the walls today.
W7SKY is not a break from the past. It is its continuation. What always defined this house was doing, not staging. Building, not decorating. Hosting, not selling.
A House That Never Stopped Becoming
When the current generation decided to transform the house into a design hotel, the intention was never to erase its history — but to translate it.
Into a contemporary architectural and emotional language — without losing its depth.
The building you see today still carries all its previous lives within its structure:
a workshop and stable,
a family home,
a guesthouse,
and now a place of elevated design, stillness and spatial quality.