On the first of October 1755 a fire ran through Schwarzenberg and took the Hirschen, the parish church and fourteen houses around the square. What went up in its place is what stands there now: a broad Alemannic timber house in the local Bauernbarock, rebuilt under the carpenter Anton Metzler and his son Georg, its shingled front set with windows in even rows like a ledger. The square it faces is generally held to be the best preserved in Vorarlberg — a fountain, a church, and the outsized inns of a valley that grew rich in the eighteenth century on muslin and long-distance trade. A tavern is documented on this spot as early as 1601. The family that runs it, the Fetzes, are now in their tenth generation.

The church rebuilt alongside it is worth the two minutes it takes to cross the square. In 1757 a teenaged Angelika Kauffmann, daughter of the painter hired to decorate it, worked up thirteen apostle medallions after engravings by Piazzetta; they are the only wall paintings she ever made. Four decades later, by then one of the most celebrated painters in Europe and a founding member of London's Royal Academy, she painted a Coronation of the Virgin in her Rome studio and sent it back to her father's village, where it was set above the altar in 1802. The Kleberhaus down the lane, a farmhouse of 1556, has held her museum since 2007.

Franz Fetz took the house on in December 1975 and began hanging art on its walls; his children Peter and Pia took over in 2017 and have spent the years since adding rather than replacing. In the kitchen, Raphaela and Jonathan Burger cook nose to tail out of a fermentation cellar and an ageing room the house calls its ham hammam — three toques and sixteen points from Gault&Millau for 2026, a Michelin Green Star, and Kässpätzle still on the snack course. Dinner is served in three original Wälderstuben and in the Landammannsaal, a ballroom of about 1882 with a veranda along its flank. Peter Fetz eats at table 70, by the bar.

The newest of the three houses opened in May 2024. The Badehaus, by the Dornbirn practice NONA Architektinnen, is a two-storey timber building under a hipped roof, its facade made of movable wooden slats that each guest works by hand, opening and closing the light across a fifteen-metre pool, two saunas, a curving central stair and a garden planted in the loose, late-flowering manner of Piet Oudolf. An underground passage reaches it from both older buildings, so nobody crosses the courtyard in a bathrobe unless they want to. It was built by Bregenzerwald carpenters from regional timber and took the Tourism and Leisure category of Austria's Staatspreis Architektur in 2025 — which, in a valley that has spent thirty years quietly exporting its carpentry standards through the Werkraum Bregenzerwald, reads less like an award than like a family photograph.