A 24-mile-long sandbar with an alluvial core, the North-Frisian island of Sylt is famed for being the most expensive place to buy a house in Germany—hence its reputation as the Teutonic equivalent of the Hamptons. It was therefore only natural that the Lanserhof Group of luxury hotel-clinics, which started in Austria, should seek to capture a larger share of the German health-tourism market by opening a complex on the island. Now counting four principal addresses, Lanserhof offers a weeklong cure based on the abstemious dietary recommendations of Dr. Franz Xaver Mayr (1875–1965) as well as a battery of health checks, treatments, and fitness regimes. For its first seaside development, the group called on ingenhoven associates, a Düsseldorf-based firm that, in 2014, completed Lanserhof’s Tegernsee hotel-clinic in Bavaria, and also renovated and extended the original complex at Lans in the Austrian Tyrol (2017), as well as fitting out its UK outpost at the Arts Club in London’s Mayfair district (2019).

The seaside site (above) and the island’s local thatch industry influenced the design of Lanserhof Sylt’s main building (top of page). Photo © HG Esch, click to enlarge.