2023-10-14 17:02:55
These clean lines in light wood and glass would look good as a chalet for the wealthy, but in Austria, they are reserved for biquettes, a marketing strategy to survive in a declining sector.
In the heart of the bucolic region of Vorarlberg (west), renowned for its architecture and its concern for ecological housing, the farms have replaced the dark traditional sheds to play the modernity card.
Solar panels, walls built with spruce trees from the surrounding area, large windows: “architecture is a way of differentiating us,” explains operator Ingo Metzler, 58 years old.
Also at stake is “animal welfare”, he says, aware that “breeding is a very emotional subject in society”: a happy goat will provide more whey, which he then uses to make milk. cheese and cosmetics.
The farm offers its hundred tenants everything they need. For example, dominant individuals can access elevated enclosures, “so the animals are not stressed.”
Since this transformation, visitors have been flocking: some 10,000 per year come to visit the premises.
And the originally modest operation, inherited from his parents, now provides luxurious beauty products, welcomes Mr. Metzler, graying beard and cap flanked by his name.
The fifty-year-old says he had no other choice but to move upmarket to find a place in the market in the face of “difficult conditions: sloping terrain, harsh climate, small production with significant fixed costs”.
“We knew we wouldn’t win the price war,” he notes.
– Prestige –
Hence the risky but rewarding choice to expand with panache: Ingo Metzler had heard that an architect usually designing schools and villas had rebuilt the family barn which had gone up in smoke.
“He came to see me, the fact that I grew up on a farm allowing me to be aware of the specific constraints of this type of construction,” says the person concerned, Christian Lässer.
“Cheese factory, maturation warehouses, cold rooms… I knew the processes”.
And it is no coincidence that this extraordinary farm was born in this part of the world, where the smallest house can appear on glossy papers.
In Vorarlberg, which has more than 200 architects for around 410,000 inhabitants, “there is a very old tradition of wooden construction”, says Ingo Metzler, “with a network of craftsmen always focused on the spirit of the times” and sought following all over the world.
He has already been emulated: Christian Lässer recently delivered another high-tech farmhouse to his nephew.
“People are very happy to see us at the forefront while around us, we are rather going out of business,” says Stefan Lässer.
Because Austria lost more than 56% of the 200,000 farms it had when it joined the European Union in 1995 and the agricultural sector today represents only 1.5% of its GDP.
According to the farmer, the modernity of the premises confers “a certain prestige” and means that people are perhaps “ready to give an extra euro for the products”.
According to Christian Lässer, architecture students are also starting to take an interest in the agricultural sector, which must more often than before welcome the public and review its uses.
Ingo Metzler is reassured: where others prefer to go to town, three of his four sons work alongside him.
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