The Alpiness coliving vision
When we opened Alpiness coliving with Fabienne in 2023 we had two main goals:
- Build a home and community for remote workers in the Alps: trying to show that life in a small mountain village can be as good (if not better) as in the city
- Contribute to our village and local community one project at a time: we want to build bridges, not bubbles and we try to have a positive impact.
So here is an overview of what we’ve achieved so far at Alpiness and what’s our vision for the future:
A home & community for remote workers and outdoor lovers
Small rural villages like ours are slowly dying all across Europe. Most younger people move to the cities to study or work and never come back, slowly leading to rural depopulation. On the other hand, more and more people can work remotely, but often feel lonely and disconnected from nature, leaving in densely populated areas. That’s why we think a place like Alpiness can build bridges between these two worlds.
Leaving in a rural mountain village like ours has many advantages:
- You’re surrounded by beautiful nature and incredible mountains
- It’s quiet and you have more than 300 days of sun per year
- All outdoor activities you can imagine are possible from our doorstep
- The cost of leaving is much cheaper than in cities (actually a lot of people are surprised how little they spend while staying at Alpiness, even if we are in Switzerland)
- There are less distractions and you can slow down, balance & focus more on what matters for you at the moment
- you can have the best cheese from the local cheese factory every day 🙂
- and so much more…
But one narrative we often hear is that there is nothing happening in villages like ours, that life is boring… but it doesn’t have to be like this and that’s where Alpiness comes into play. Since we opened in 2023, we mainly focus on community, hosting more than 200 remote workers (our occupancy rate is above 90%), sharing dinners from Monday to Friday, doing all sort of activities together! All our colivers are invited to participate, to cocreate the experience, to share ideas, to support each other, to do stuff together… and that’s the foundation leading to strong connexions between people and a vibrant community.
Of course we also provide various spaces for people to be productive (3 coworking spaces, equipped with office chairs, monitors, a call room, strong wifi…) as we all have to spend time working on our respective projects. We also have multiple communal spaces, a gym & climbing wall, a fully equipped kitchen… But that’s the infrastructure most of the coliving spaces should provide and what truly matters is what’s happening between the people, the moments they share, what they cocreate. And I think so far we did a pretty good job here (read what our colivers think of Alpiness).
Let’s build mountain utopia together: the long term vision
One thing we’ve dreamed of and that we didn’t expect to happen so fast is that some community members would actually chose to move in our village for real. Since the beginning, more than 5 people have permanently relocated to Les Haudères (the name of our village) and we know some others are seriously thinking about it. That’s incredible!
The coliving model is great but it’s still a mid-term accommodation where most guests come and go after staying 1-3 months. But we quickly realized that a lot of people would come back to Alpiness after their first stay (we have a return rate that’s around 50%). The Alpiness returnees are the people that connect the most to our valley and the community we’ve created here. They come back again and again, building strong connexions with us, other colivers and even some local people… To the point some of them decided to chose our village as their main base (some even bought a place here).
This is incredible for us because we had dreamed of having a long term community of like minded people in our village, and it’s now happening for real! We don’t need a big number of people. I feel we just need to reach a tipping point of 10-15 people to get some momentum towards our mountain utopia.
Imagine: You live in this peaceful village surrounded by this incredible mountain playground. But you’re not alone, other like minded people decided to do the same and you share meals and adventures together all year round. At the center of the village, there is this coliving space that keeps bringing new faces & energy. But there is also a public coworking & event space where you can work from and gather for games, movies or skillshares… and so much more!
Does that sounds appealing to you? Come and check it out! You might like what we are building here 😉
How we contribute to our village and local community
Alpiness’s success as a coliving and a community was an important milestone. It’s the foundation that allows us to have the freedom & headspace to invest in creative rural projects. If we would struggle financially and constantly battle to fill up the space, it would be another story.
With that said, from day 1, it was our intention to create our coliving in a place where it could have the biggest impact. That’s why we carefully selected some municipalities with “rural mountain problematics” (aging population, less job opportunities, access to less infrastructures) and started by presenting our coliving project to the people in charge (president of the municipalities, head of tourism boards). We only looked for properties to buy in villages where we felt our project was welcome and synergies were possible. And that’s how we ended up in the village we are now (you can read more about it here).
So how do we contribute to our local community?
The coliving model has a positive impact in itself
The coliving model is already interesting on it’s own as it attracts people that differs a lot from normal tourists:
- Their average stay duration varies from 1-3 months (much longer than people coming for just a few days).
- They behave more like people living in the village, working during the week, doing their groceries in the local shops and visiting when they have free time. They don’t try to see all the hotspots of our valley and come to Alpiness as much for the community as for the beautiful nature around the coliving.
- There is less seasonality and people not only come during winter / summer holidays but also the rest of the year.
I think it’s great because I guess most destination would dream to have people that stay longer, travel slower and not only during peak season no?
Trava: our public coworking and event space
In partnership with our municipality (they provide the space for free in the building that used to be the primary school of our village), we also opened in 2025 our public coworking and event space called Trava. We built it as a separate non profit organisation that aims to:
- provide a public coworking space that is open 7/7 – 24/24 to anyone that needs it (people leaving here, tourists, secondary residencies, colivers)
- create a third space where people can meet and organise events.
- encourage cooperation and solidarity in our local communty
- promote a more durable and collective use of common spaces
- organise cultural, sports or educational activities
We see a lot of potential in this space as it’s open to anyone and it’s been thought to be quite flexible. For now it’s mainly used as coworking space during the day and for events in the evenings. For example we organise a monthly board game night that’s quite a success, where people from the village meet colivers (which is great). But the space has been used for many other things such as yoga classes, pilates, meetings, mario kart tournaments, avalanche courses and so on…
If you want to know more, you can check the Trava website here.
Our local cinema revival
Since September 2025, we are also involved in the non profit organization that ambitions to revive the small cinema of our village (it had been closed for many years, another casualty of rural decline). Fabienne is one of the founding member of the cinema while Ben is the webmaster of the association.
Why did we get involved in this project?
Because a cinema is the kind of infrastructure we don’t find in villages like ourse. If people from here want to go to the cinema, they need to drive down 45 minutes to Sion, the closest city. But here we were lucky enough to have a fully functional cinema room that just waited to be revived by a group of motivated people. Of course it’s about providing entertaining movies for adults and younger people in our municipality (we have 3 recent movies per week!). But it’s also about giving them a place to gather (that is not a bar 😉 ) and another reason to choose village life over the city!
If you want to know more, you can check the cinema website here (and yes we also have movies in english from time to time)
The community garden
Back in the days, there were a lot of people gardening in our village. Most of the land between houses was used to plant fruits and vegetables during the summer months (May to October). But nowadays, with the easy access to fresh veggies all year long at the supermarket and the aging population, there are less and less people gardening (which is a shame because it also made the village prettier).
When we bought the Alpiness building, some neighbour visited us one day and offered us to use their land to garden during the summer months. With Fabienne, we had ZERO experience in gardening but we said yes anyways. I mean, we had nothing to lose but time and we thought it could be fun to learn how to grow our own veggies. It’s been some hard work and a lot of learnings but the results were quite interesting:
- We managed to actually grow a lot of vegetables that we provide for free in the coliving, reducing significantly food costs for community dinners in summer.
- As the garden is located in the middle of the village, it helped us meet a lot of neighbors we didn’t know yet. It’s funny how locals naturally came to talk to us and give us advices while we were gardening (probably our most successful project to get to know locals better 😉 ).
- We also try to include colivers in the gardening process with more or less success depending on the groups. Most people coming to the coliving know very little about how to grow veggies and what better way to teach than bringing people directly in the garden.
- We also have a big compost that we use to nourish the ground twice a year. It’s also a way to reduce trash significantly!
That’s about it for now but you should know more about what we try to create at Alpiness coliving. Of course we’ll keep updating this page as we work on more projects in our valley. And if you have any question, feel free to reach out to us here 🙂 .
