At home with Rolf Sachs and Mafalda von Hessen – the painter-princess and the polymath

“I love the word ‘oomph’,” says Rolf Sachs, sitting with his girlfriend, German princess and painter Mafalda von Hessen, in the living room of his St Moritz home. The creative polymath, best known for the playful design pieces he has produced since the mid-1980s, is using the word to sum up his creative practice. But the Alpine retreat also has oomph aplenty.

In the midst of the glitzy Swiss ski resort – where steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, Moncler CEO Remo Ruffini and the Heineken family all have homes – Sachs has revived the stadium built for the 1928 Winter Olympic Games. Once used for watching ice hockey and figure skating, the long, low Bauhaus-style building is today a mash-up of modernist architecture and local sporting memorabilia: hockey sticks cover a stairwell; curling stones are tucked under a folksy bench; and vintage photographs featuring skaters, tobogganers and bobsledders line the halls.

In the mix are Sachs’s own designs: a 7m-long glass-topped dining table is filled with salt and neon text; above it, one of his Pouring Lights, from 2006, features an upturned fire bucket punctured with small holes; old school chairs are cast in resin; and the 2012 Insepar-able coffee table, constructed from two sledges, is one of a number of works inspired by the traditions of the surrounding Engadin Valley. 

“My great-great grandfather came to St Moritz in 1900,” says Sachs, 68, whose family history spans generations of industrialists and inventors, makers of motorbikes, bicycles, cars – and several fortunes. But it is his father, Gunter Sachs, the late photographer, art collector and third husband to Brigitte Bardot, who is known for putting the ritz into St Moritz. He invigorated the Bobsleigh Club (whose historic track has a corner named in his honour) and founded the exclusive Dracula Club.

When I heard he was divorced, I called him up

At a dinner at the vampire-themed members’ club, I’m squeezed between Sachs and von Hessen – swept into the Euro-elite scene alongside guests including Sachs’ childhood friends, his studio director and the flame-haired, pin-up-esque Betony Vernon, jeweller, author of The Boudoir Bible and a close friend of von Hessen. The group stands out from the crowd: a sea of dinner jackets, slinky dresses and plumped-up faces that move en masse from dinner table to disco – dancing to “Murder On the Dancefloor”. A drop of enamel “blood” drips down my wine glass and Sachs pinches an ultra-skinny chip from my plate. He’s instantly likeable; less jet-set playboy than his father, more jolly bon viveur.

Sachs and von Hessen have long moved in the same circles (“Our fathers were friends,” says Sachs). Von Hessen’s Alpine link stretches back to 1916. Her relative Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, inherited Schloss Tarasp, an imposing, 11th-century castle to the north-east of St Moritz. Today, the castle is owned by the Swiss artist Not Vital and is open to the public. 

The couple started seeing each other romantically 10 years ago. “When I heard he was divorced, I called him up,” says von Hessen. At 58, the former model and style ambassador for Giorgio Armani is tall and willowy, wearing a Victorian-style blouse. Sachs, meanwhile, pairs his signature round-rimmed glasses with a characteristically bright and graphic jumper. They strike an unlikely couple. Yet, says Sachs, “we have a wonderful harmony.”

“It’s so wonderful to live with another artist,” adds von Hessen, whose pink-walled Baroque home in Rome, Villa Polissena, is both her studio and their main base. “In the evening I always show Rolf my work – and he laughs because I always say the same thing: ‘It’s getting there.’” 

Von Hessen studied painting in her 20s at New York University; “but I didn’t like my figurative work so I applied my art to costume and theatre stage design”, she says. In 2015 she launched her own eponymous fashion label, partnering with Karl Lagerfeld’s longtime right-hand man Eric Wright, but “stopped the business” during Covid-19. In the wake of the closure, she used painting to fill the “emptiness” she felt.

This winter, she held her first solo show at Villa Flor – a hotel in the Engadin village of S-chanf. The series explores her “connection with the mountains”, homing in on interiors and wrought in thick, harmoniously coloured paint. She has followed her Swiss debut with a London solo, currently at JGM Gallery. Painting is part of “a totally new chapter”, says von Hessen, who has four children from two of her three previous marriages. “Now my children are out of the house. I have the freedom to finally do what I want.” Sachs agrees: “We’re both free to work with a very clear head. It’s also very lucky that [our practices] are polar opposites: Mafalda is super-academic whereas I’m more about the conceptual idea. We are very good critics of each other.”

Sachs’ work has always straddled the line between art and design, but “I’ve moved slowly more and more into the realm of art”, he says. This renewed fervour has been channelled into a number of projects. Last October, a selling exhibition at Sotheby’s London was dedicated to Sachs’ new Moving Stills: photographs of everyday objects such as rolls of toilet paper. And in December, he opened a solo show at Stalla Madulain in a 500-year-old barn, which became part mini Sachs universe, part love letter to the area he grew up in. It was the first time he had shown paintings, abstract crumpled-then-uncrumpled canvases he calls Defroissage. “It’s a little bit like showing yourself naked,” he says, yet it’s a discipline he plans to stick with.

Sachs is now working towards a major museum retrospective in 2025. But that doesn’t stop the couple from being a central fixture of the increasingly bustling local scene. They zip around the valley in an instantly recognisable pair of wicker-basket-topped Fiat Pandas. “They’re the best cars for driving on ice,” says Sachs, who drives at some speed up the steep and circuitous mountain roads. The area’s creative landscape is “the real soul” of St Moritz, says Sachs. “Not the fur coats, champagne and little dogs.” 

Mafalda von Hessen: Looking In is at JGM Gallery until 25 May; jgmgallery.com. rolfsachs.com