Haus Gawaling and the Women Who Bring Home to Life

Haus Gawaling has a remarkable story. Can you take us back to its beginnings?

Gawaling means place of bliss or paradise in Tibetan. The name came before anyone knew what the house would become, an act of faith or maybe instruction. The four Gampatshang sisters took it over in 2009—my mother being the youngest. For more than a decade, they filled it with gatherings, rituals, and Tibetan New Year celebrations, always centered on togetherness, keeping something alive.

There is power in that lineage of women moving together. In 2020, I continued what they began, opening the house to artists and creatives. The sisters remain an active part of it. That continuity is everything.

What do you remember most vividly about growing up at Haus Gawaling?

I didn’t grow up in this house—my connection is something I built as an adult. It truly became mine during COVID and the summer of Black Lives Matter. After four years in Shanghai, the pandemic forced me to leave overnight. I returned to Switzerland unsure of what came next, until my aunt called: she couldn’t carry the house alone anymore. It was waiting.

A group of artist friends soon came for what we called a radical self-care retreat. Not a program, just friends reminding each other that care can be resistance. That gathering made something clear: a generation coming out of exile needed a place to exhale, to celebrate, to be in nature, and to remember that joy is inheritance. In that moment, Haus Gawaling became that place for me.

Gawaling carries a strong matrilineal thread. Since taking over in 2020, how has that legacy of women-led stewardship influenced your decisions and vision?

My mother wanted to be a teacher. I often think about what she and her sisters might have chosen if choice had fully been theirs. That is where the thread begins: not in intention, but in what was asked of them, and what they gave anyway.

As a Tibetan diaspora family in Switzerland, someone had to navigate systems and keep things stable. The house was always open—for help with visa applications, health insurance, dental braces. A quiet leadership that never called itself leadership.

Carrying that history into Haus Gawaling, I began to understand the women in my family more deeply. This place strips things back, and I see them not just as holders of stability, but as individuals with their own dreams, losses, and courage. That understanding shapes every decision I make here, a stewardship born not from power but from responsibility and love.

Stepping into leadership is always a journey. What has surprised you most?

How layered it was. I came in thinking my role was to change things, to bring my world here. I quickly realized the task was almost the opposite: to understand what already existed, to value it before adding anything new.

This place asked me to reckon with where I come from. My own biography, once abstract, gained weight. Managing the house became a way of managing myself—what to continue, what to decode, where to add without replacing.

The people I bring to Haus Gawaling are part of that process, helping me see what it is and what it can still become. It attracts a distinctive creative community.

What kind of artists find their way there, and are there any whose presence particularly shifted the energy of the place?

The artists who come to Gawaling are drawn to slowness and meaningful exchange. They work with intention, attentive to what is seen and unseen. Different disciplines, different places, but all read the space, respond to it, and leave something behind.

My collaborator Chanel founded the Mountain Rookie Club, bringing a new generation into the Alps—people who were never told those spaces belonged to them. When these two worlds meet, that friction is productive.

Two moments stand out. One was our Summer Solstice gathering, when workshops, hikes, and conversations flowed into dawn, and my aunt Tsewang Taksham read a Bodhisattva vow aloud—a promise to remain in service of others for as long as there is suffering in the world. That is the spirit of the house.

The second was quieter. Our friend, Mexican artist Diego Flores, worked under the Lion’s Gate full moon, guided by the red monk-colored fabric honoring the tiger spirit—also the name of my aunt Tsewang. In that slowness, a work came alive, and he left it for the house. That kind of exchange, born of trust and time, is what matters most here.

What is the quality you most admire in a woman?

The capacity to hold contradiction without needing to resolve it. The women I most admire—in my family, in my creative community—can carry grief and joy at the same time, be authoritative yet permeable, build structure and dismantle it when its purpose has been served. Often misread as inconsistency, it’s actually a sophisticated intelligence: the ability to remain fluid without losing your center.

What does “home” mean to you today?

I used to think home was where you were from. Now I see it as somewhere you keep choosing. My relationship to Haus Gawaling isn’t inherited—I built it, chose it, repeatedly, until it finally held. 

What moves me most is what the four sisters did when they bought it: they brought Tibet home, made something lost tangible, and opened it to others. The house became a place for those navigating displacement. I also carry a Tibetan understanding of home: nomadic, a practice of orientation rather than a fixed place.

Today, home is where my full complexity is not a problem. Haus Gawaling is that place. If it could speak, I think it would say: the women who shaped me never asked me to be more than I was, and so I became more than anyone expected. The women in my family, the artists and collaborators, all moved through this house as you move through someone you love—adding, receiving, leaving it more itself than they found it. That quiet, unannounced power, that gratitude, is what I trust.