Built to be
inherited.
Chesa Studio is an alpine real estate development and restoration practice working between Samedan, in the Swiss Engadin, and Litchfield County, Connecticut. We restore old houses and build new ones to the same standard, for families who intend to keep them for generations.
One studio, from the first walk to the final fabric.
Your client gets a single point of contact and one standard of care across every stage. You get a partner who makes the introduction easy, keeps the process quiet, and gives the property a story that holds up at the closing table.
We write paragraphs, not decks. The first deliverable is a written reading of the building that the client, the architect, and the contractor can all hold in their hands.
A tired house becomes a home for three generations.
We strip a paint chip in eight layers before we choose a color, read the stair rhythm and the stone thresholds, and keep what the building already knows. Lime over plaster, fumed oak and reclaimed chestnut, fieldstone laid in lime mortar, a ceramic stove at the heart of the plan. The house comes forward as itself, ready for children, dogs, dinners, and the next owner after that.
A new house, built to read as if it has stood for a century.
Most new houses read new because the specification reads new: gypsum board on steel studs, factory stone on a foam backer, prefinished floors. We build a different sentence. By the second winter the lime has warmed to bone, the oak has settled, and the house carries the quiet weight of a building older than its owners.
A Greenwich or New Canaan buyer is usually trying to find what Greenberg, Schafer, and Stern build. We share that canon. The difference is the specification behind the wall, and a workshop name on every fixed material.
A standing network of hands, not a scramble of subcontractors.
We keep the same hands on every job, on both sides of the Atlantic. A few of them, by material:
- Flooring Hull Forest Products, fumed oak and reclaimed chestnut milled in long planks.
- Stone & marble Litchfield Stone for fieldstone laid in lime mortar; Vermont Danby for the white marble.
- Plaster Halloran Plaster for hand-troweled lime and sgraffito.
- Metal P.E. Guerin and E.R. Butler, unlacquered bronze hardware cast in New York.
- Marble Henraux, Calacatta and Bardiglio blocked at the quarry above Querceta.
- Heat Sommerhuber of Steyr, ceramic kachelofen tile.
- Cloth Tessanda Val Müstair, linen hand-woven since 1928.
Wellness and longevity, built into the walls.
The resort world now sells longevity beside the villa. We build it into the fabric, from the Swiss valley the science comes from. Sleep, air, heat, light, cold, and quiet are design decisions, made at the same table as the structure.
Stone pine for the sleep rooms, lime on every surface that breathes, a masonry stove that warms without moving the air, a sauna and a cold plunge past the garden door. It needs no machine room.
Homes built and restored across the world.
Tom Engo has built and restored houses from the Swiss Alps to the American Northeast. The same hand, the same standard, in very different weather.
Zürich · Saas-Fee · New York City · Washington · Litchfield County, Connecticut · Millbrook, New York
The introduction your client thanks you for.
A story that holds
A property with named materials and a written narrative appraises and sells on substance, not staging.
One point of contact
Your client calls one studio for restoration, new build, interiors, and the years of care after.
Discretion, kept
We work quietly, on a small number of commissions a year, between the Engadin, New York, and Connecticut.
We work in the four to ten million dollar range with developers, family offices, and the private owners they answer to. Most commissions begin with a site walk, and the first walk of the building costs nothing.
Bring us the house.
Send the address, the intent, and a budget range, or just call the studio. We respond to every serious inquiry within two working days, and references are available on request.