PORTAL IN AVORIAZ: BUILT LIKE A FEELING
Avoriaz doesn’t look like it was designed to be liked. It looks like it was designed to insist.
High in Haute Savoie, the resort rises out of the mountains in dark timber and angled concrete, a slanted, jagged mass that feels closer to a utopian film set than a traditional ski village. The buildings don’t sit politely in the landscape. They argue with it—then, from a few steps back, they suddenly start to mimic it. A ridge line. A silhouette. A city that decides to disappear the moment you stop staring at its details.
Photography — @achillemauri.eu
Video — @smamaj
Film Editing — sanna.c.h
Words — @kadens.journal
That tension—ornament up close, minimalism from afar is the reason Portal went.
Not because the Alps are cinematic (they are), but because Avoriaz has a kind of logic that feels strangely aligned with how Portal wants to exist: as a system of decisions rather than a single statement.
The village is famous for its architecture by Jacques Labro and his team, an experiment in form and function that still reads as futuristic decades later. And it was built around a constraint that changes everything: no cars inside the resort. Movement is the infrastructure.
Patrick Stangbye, Portal’s Creative Director, talks about arriving from Scandinavia and feeling the contrast immediately. Back home, mountain development often expands outward: bigger cabins, more private space, more separation. The architecture of Jacques Labro in Avoriaz compresses the built environment, but gives the landscape back to you. “Things are tighter,” he says, “but there’s so much space in the mountains around and the mountain feels more untouched.”
Portal didn’t pick Avoriaz because it’s “pretty Alps.” They picked it because the place behaves like a manifesto.
A SHOOT WITHOUT EXCESS
The team was small by design: the four founders—Patrick, John, Colin, and Barrie—alongside photographer Achille Mauri and filmmaker Sebastian Mamaj. No assistants. No layered hierarchy. No convoy. Just a group moving through the resort and surrounding mountains the way the place was intended to be used—on foot, between locations, carrying only what was necessary.
The days were shaped by the mountains rather than a call sheet. A few usable hours of light in the morning, a few again in the evening, and long stretches in between when the sun flattened everything into something unremarkable. The rhythm became cyclical: run, ride, wait, return, repeat. There’s an efficiency that emerges in that kind of setup. Decisions happen faster. Ideas live out in the open, not protected inside documents.
Up close, Avoriaz is visually dense. The buildings are full of interruptions—angled joints, layered materials, small architectural gestures that only make sense when you’re standing right next to them. Step back and the complexity resolves. The village becomes quiet, graphic, almost minimal against the mountain.
It’s a shift in perception that mirrors how Portal thinks about its own work.
Close in, their products reveal reinforcement points—quiet stitches, laser-cut perforations, subtle cinches—functional solutions that quietly repeat across the collection. From a distance, those details dissolve into clean silhouettes and muted colours that sit comfortably in the landscape. Over time, those functional decisions start to form a quiet visual language—recognisable only if you’ve worn the pieces long enough to understand why they’re there.
Like Avoriaz, the complexity reveals itself gradually. From afar, both the architecture and the clothing read as restrained, almost minimal. Step closer and the logic becomes apparent: nothing decorative, nothing accidental.
This is a design that doesn’t perform for the camera first. It performs for weather, movement, and repetition.
PRESENCE WITHOUT PERFORMANCE
The four founders appear in the images, but not as a statement. There’s no sense of “front-facing identity” or forced visibility. They’re there because they’re already there—training, moving, inhabiting the place.
It wasn’t always the plan. Using founders as talent can easily slide into self-reference. Here, it reads differently. Less introduction, more documentation. The people building the brand become part of the environment it’s placed in, not separate from it.
What comes through isn’t personality so much as shared understanding: of movement, of aesthetics, of how certain things should feel rather than how they should be explained.
That shared understanding is what allows Portal to operate the way it does—without over-justifying choices, without flattening ideas into slogans. Some places simply make sense for certain kinds of work. Avoriaz is one of them.
MOVING WITH ACHILLE
There are many technically brilliant photographers. But this would not have been the same work if the person behind the camera hadn’t been able to move with the team—up ridgelines, across mud, through architecture—at the same pace. The images depend on that mobility. On someone who understands the activities not as spectacle, but as something you inhabit.
Achille knew Avoriaz already, but through a different lens—snowboard films and winter mythologies. Seeing it in summer, stripped of its usual context, opened something else. Some frames were imagined in advance—loose references, fragments of ideas. Others appeared only because everyone was present enough to notice them.
The references were broad but understated, ranging from Ingmar Bergman to alpine documentary photography. A body—Barrie, still in a cycling kit—slipping into a lake. Clothes arranged across a roof, read as graphic texture rather than narrative. Moments held somewhere between cinema and alpine imagery. A runner—John—losing footing at the edge of a muddy bank: not staged, not planned, but kept because it felt true.
Someone deeply familiar with the area later questioned some of the locations used. Why run there? Why photograph that path, cutting straight through the buildings?
That playfulness—the willingness to see a place sideways—comes from not treating a location as fixed. And it comes from being present. Not outsourcing vision. Not reporting back to someone elsewhere. Being there together, with enough trust to try things that might not work.
That presence became especially important as conditions tightened. The light windows were short. The weather closed in unexpectedly. A thunderstorm cut the final evening short, leaving only minutes to capture the last frame before going inside. What remains from that moment—an image caught just before the light disappeared—feels urgent because it was.
PRODUCT AS PART OF THE MOMENT
In one of the defining images, a runner meets a cyclist at sunset. The light is so precise it almost looks unreal, as if it’s been heavily worked in post. It wasn’t.
John, the cyclist, moves through a steeply banked curve, while Patrick appears to run above him—suspended for a moment over the arching line of the berm as it drops toward the valley. The geometry feels intentional, almost architectural, like something designed to be photographed.
It wasn’t.
The scene came together in minutes. A narrow window of light, a freeride berm in the mountain bike park, the sun already slipping away. Nothing was planned. Patrick was still wearing cycling bibs. The shoes were borrowed, half a size too small. There was no time to change, no time to refine. The product itself is almost incidental.
And yet the image works. Brilliantly.
Because the moment matters more than the item being explained. The garment doesn’t announce itself or demand attention. It exists inside a situation that feels lived, temporary, and slightly precarious. The product becomes part of a larger system—of light, architecture, urgency, and movement—rather than the reason for the image.
That distinction matters.
Portal isn’t documenting performance in isolation. It’s documenting the point where design leaves the studio and enters the world—where months of development suddenly become tangible, worn and tested, carried through weather and uncertainty.
In that sense, the shoot becomes a quiet celebration. Not of scale or success, but of arrival. Of things finally existing beyond a screen, a prototype, a factory floor.
Avoriaz turned out to be the right place to articulate that, almost accidentally: a village built as a system rather than a spectacle, architecture that only reveals itself if you stay long enough to understand how it works, and a setting where nothing asks to be rushed.
