The luxury Alpine retreat blending mountain calm with a complete body reset

Psychogeography tells us that places can exert an influence over our mood or being: we yearn to feel the meaning of somewhere as much as we need to experience its physical presence. Mount Med, a new wellness resort housed within a 12th-century barn that started life as a roadside rest and recovery site for Bavarian monks collecting tithes in the Austrian Alps, is therefore off to a resounding start. In the intervening centuries, the ‘Probstenhof’, as it was known, served as a post office and a courthouse before returning to its original calling as a guest house. Now the building sits at the heart of a refuge of a different, if no less rehabilitating, kind – one with a keen interest in preserving and rewarding health.

You’ll find Mount Med 90 or so minutes’ drive from Munich in one of Tyrol’s more glorious valleys. Here, Oberau-Wildschönau, with its beautiful baroque church, is a blissful setting in which to house a clinical redoubt from the pressures of life; the perfect spot to unwind, recharge and attend to some of those needing physio- and psychological issues that can plague our day-to-day lives. Comprising 10 buildings (including 46 rooms and 14 chalet suites) to form a self-contained retreat, Mount Med hosts a groundbreaking approach to healing developed by aesthetic and reconstructive surgeon Dr Alexander Papp and his Mylife Changer co-founder Horst Untemoser.

Together with Alexander’s brother, Stephan, a trauma surgeon specialising in sports injuries, the medical team at Mount Med embraces the holistic approach, advocating a low-calorie, protein-rich diet alongside a programme of vitamin infusions to aid detoxification, removing the need for fasting, while still achieving a state of ketosis (the process by which the body switches from using glucose to burning fat to create energy). The result: rather than enervating, the resort and its stylish yet comforting surroundings is remarkably energising, aided and abetted by Dr Stephan’s careful adjudication of skeleto-muscular fitness and the ample opportunity for both exercise and relaxation. As you would expect, Mount Med offers a plethora of programmes, from advanced diagnostics (Dr Stephan is the director of a local hospital offering next-day blood analysis as well as various scanners) to dermatology.

But staying the cruel hand of time seems uppermost in people’s minds here: hence the focus on cellular anti-ageing as the core of Mylife Changer’s manifesto. Regimens start with 23 key biomarkers being taken, after which personalised treatments reflect the goals of the guest: nothing particularly arduous is involved, simply the requirement to submit to evidenced-based protocols using intravenously administered supplements. Skilfully designed with plenty of soft furnishings, a bar (serving mocktails as well as alcohol on demand), the atmosphere here is more après-ski than sanatorium, with excellent food served in surroundings that in some cases (the fine-dining restaurant Aurea for instance) seem barely to have changed in almost a millennium.