Tim Mitja Zagar

I grew up around Bled. As a kid, I used to walk past a villa that was slowly falling apart and wonder why nobody was doing anything about it. That villa is the Kursalon (German for "cure salon"), built in 1895 as the central hall of Arnold Rikli's sanatorium. Rikli, a Swiss natural healer known as the "Sun Doctor", had arrived on Bled in 1855 and spent the next fifty years building what was arguably Europe's first wellness destination. I acquired the villa in 2024. Since then, we've been working with a team of specialists to develop plans for restoring this remarkable building to its former glory. Reconstruction begins in 2026.

Bled is a magical place that deserves to be seen the way it once was. I want to help bring it back to the glory it had when Rikli's sanatorium was thriving, in a modern form. The villa will become a museum, and a place where his ideas come alive again. Not just preservation, but something people can experience the way his original guests did: sun, air, water, diet, and movement.