VALS, SWITZERLAND — Rain pelted the windshield as I drove up the Vals Valley. Waterfalls coursed over cliff faces, and the tops of the Alps were lost in fog.
Not the kind of weather that walkers who come to Vals in the summer long for. But the rain suited me. I was headed for a spa about 120 miles southeast of Zurich, where I planned to spend the next 24 hours.
I admit it: I like fancy spas and will go out of my way for a Brittany seaweed wrap or a four-handed ayurvedic massage.
But I didn't come to Vals for that -- at least, not strictly so. I came to see the stunning, contemporary bathhouse designed by Peter Zumthor.
The Swiss architect is much admired in professional circles but is not as well-known to the public as Frank Gehry or Norman Foster. Most of Zumthor's completed projects are outside the U.S. and the architect, who declined to be interviewed for this article, isn't interested in media coverage.
But Zumthor has written this about Therme Vals: "Our spa is no fun fair with the latest technical gadgets, water games, jets, sprays and slides but focuses on the quiet, primary experience of bathing, cleansing, relaxing . . . the feeling of water and physical contact with primordial stone."
Water and stone are all around the Vals Valley. As I drove toward Vals, about 15 miles from the highway turnoff, the clouds occasionally parted, revealing farmhouses roofed with gray rock. Below, a swollen river tossed and turned in its rocky bed.
Eventually, the valley got so narrow that I thought the road would have to stop. But it kept going, as I discovered after I misunderstood directions.
So I crossed the Valserine River, which feeds the Rhine, and crawled up the mountainside, reaching a one-lane tunnel that looked like a mine shaft. Finally, I stopped at a little snack shop at Verfreila, where a dam had been built on the Valserine around 1960. Clearly, I'd gone too far, because the girl at the cash register looked at me as if I were crazy when I asked where to park for the spa.
Therme Vals is actually a little downriver from the village, near the Valser water bottling plant, in a collection of high-rise buildings that looks like a community college campus. You can't see the Zumthor bathhouse from the road because it's built into the hillside. And it's not well-marked. But that's my only criticism.
