The scene in Saint-Moritz, in Switzerland’s Engadine Valley, feels as old as time. It’s where Czar Nicholas II dreamed of constructing a summer residence, and Brigitte Bardot skied with Gunter Sachs.
But today, while aristocrats and billionaires fight over $10,000 hotel rooms and luxury stores line the main road, a five-story cement house smack in the center of town stands conspicuously unkempt.
Two large cracks are visible on the house’s chipping gray façade, and large iron beams line its front—a measure taken by town officials to keep the entire structure from crumbling. Ice snakes up the stairs to the front door. With prices in Saint-Moritz hovering around $25,000 to $35,000 per square foot, the property is estimated to be worth around $34 million.
A local policeman tells me that when tourists arrive by bus to the town square, they take photos of it. “They [can’t] believe something like this could be here,” he says.
Saint-Moritz regulars know it to be the home of 89-year-old Adolf Haeberli. “We call it villa-hold-your-hat,” Saint-Moritz’s former mayor Sigi Asprion says in Moritz Müller-Preisser’s 2020 short film, “Haeberli.”
And while residents complain about the eyesore, visitors speculate about its inhabitant, and officials worry about its imminent collapse, Haeberli goes on with his day-to-day life, reading newspapers at the Palace Hotel, attending members’ clubs, and clacking away frantically on an ancient typewriter. (Haeberli, who does not own a cell phone or use e-mail, did not respond to attempts by AIR MAIL to make contact through a visit to his residence.)
Tourists would “take photos of it. They couldn’t believe something like this could be here.”
In the 1950s, Haeberli’s mother owned the local beauty salon, which catered to some of the town’s first glamorous residents. “It was the most posh salon in all Saint-Moritz,” his former classmate Paula Maranta, an architect, says. Haeberli helped with the occasional pedicure, but never really had an appetite for it.
Then, in 1968, a community parking lot was built under Haeberli’s house, damaging its foundation. Insurance offered to pay Haeberli for the damages, but he declined, demanding more money. This marked the beginning of a drawn-out litigation process—leading him to quit his job at the salon—that would culminate in federal court, in Graubünden.
Haeberli lost the case, yet has refused to address the need for repairs on his house ever since. (Saint-Moritz town officials declined to answer AIR MAIL’s questions about whether this was grounds for eviction; for now, Haeberli remains in his home.)
In time, Haeberli was nicknamed Saint-Moritz’s “honorary angry resident.”
Though the town of Saint-Moritz has been trying to get its hands on the house for years, according to the building department, it is not violating Swiss law. “As long as he lives in the house, it’s his responsibility. It’s a freestanding house, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” a town official tells me over the phone.
Haeberli, meanwhile, spends most of his time harassing town officials about what he calls his case of “insurance fraud.”
In time, Haeberli was nicknamed Saint-Moritz’s “honorary angry resident.”
He also busies himself with writing letters, which have become legendary in Saint-Moritz, stopping in at the police station to make copies before distributing them to people in town. The letters are often addressed to “all community morons” from aliases such as “Santa Claus” or “Adolf Haeberli, Official Sufferer of Dementia.” He pokes fun at Saint-Moritz’s slogan, “Top of the world”—his version: “Top of the world bullshit”—and randomly sticks protest banners across the façade of his house.
Doubts about his sanity divide town residents, but most see him as “a very intelligent person,” as Corina Huber, a former librarian, puts it. “He is interested in many things across many fields.”
He also cuts a peculiar figure—he has a 10-inch-long white beard and often dresses in costume, favoring military garb and Muslim dishdashas. “He shoots,” the policeman says, “so when he carries his rifle around town, we get a lot of calls.”
Despite Haeberli’s brushes with the law and rough-around-the edges demeanor, the current mayor, Christian Jott Jenny, personally confirmed to me that he is friends with him. Dinner parties, premieres, and other gatherings around town are often thrown in his honor. “He loves the glitz and glamour,” Müller-Preisser tells me.
“He shoots, so when he carries his rifle around town, we get a lot of calls.”
Haeberli is also the only honorary life member of the Cresta, a sports club founded in 1887, where John F. Kennedy, Errol Flynn, and others have competed at skeleton, an extreme form of tobogganing. (To gain admission, members have to sled down an iced-over circuit headfirst.)
“Adolf is one of the bravest riders we have, and one of the great characters of our club,” Sir Alasdair Hilleary, a fellow member, says. “He’s actually a very clever guy,” adds the artist Rolf Sachs, the honorary chairman of the club.
At the Sunny Bar in Saint-Moritz’s Kulm Hotel, where Cresta riders head for bull shots and rösti after long races, a wooden frame in the entrance displays a large chunk of Haeberli’s beard (a remnant from a raucous club auction night when one Cresta member said he’d put up a 10,000-franc bet on Haeberli’s team for the next day’s races if he cut his beard off).
Haeberli takes his membership seriously—when I visited his house, amid the mess I saw a perfectly pressed blue suit with Cresta pins propped up neatly against a door.
Haeberli’s financial situation—how he paid the lawyers who represented him in court, how he makes ends meet despite not having had a job since the late 60s—is unclear. According to his late brother, Räto, who died in 2022, Haeberli has taken out mortgages on his house and used that money to invest in stocks. “Don’t think he doesn’t have millions,” he says in Müller-Preisser’s documentary.
Residents aren’t so sure, and they point to some of Haeberli’s stingier habits, such as stealing newspapers from local hotels and only buying food close to its expiration date at the local coop. “Once,” the policeman says, “he lined up all his expired milk cartons on all the windows, so you couldn’t see inside the house.”
His existence remains a polarizing one in the community. “People want to chase him out of the house, grab the spot, and make money,” the ski instructor Miroslav Sklenar says in the documentary. Huber, the librarian, counters, “As far as I know, it’s his own fault that the house is in its current state.”
“Loads of people wanted to have the house, but they only cared about the property to build an object of speculation,” Haeberli himself says in the documentary, “which is exactly what I don’t want.”
To mark the end of the ski season, the Cresta club organizes a final race every year in March. To celebrate, Haeberli wears a bodysuit filled with fireworks, and as he propels down the circuit headfirst, he lights them as he passes Shuttlecock, the most dangerous curve.
“I just think it’s extraordinary,” Müller-Preisser says. “His tenacity. I don’t think he’ll ever stop. People can say what they want, but perhaps he represents authenticity in a town where a lot of that is being forgotten.”
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL