TYROL, AUSTRIA » Bio-Hotel Stanglwirt is built of wood, marble, brick, stone — and family ties that are just as strong. Set on 30 acres with the Wilder Kaiser mountains as a dramatic backdrop, it offers style without extravagance, sophistication without pretentiousness, attentive service without intrusiveness. It is the epitome of Austrian hospitality.

The hotel dates from 1609, when it was known as the Inn on the Prama, providing hot meals and simple accommodations to travelers and a barn to shelter their horses. Hans Stangl, the second innkeeper, changed its name to Stanglwirt when he bought it in 1643 ("wirt" means "host" in German).

For more than a century, Stanglwirt has been in the hands of Hauser family. When Balthasar Hauser assumed control in 1966, he began expanding and upgrading facilities and services to earn the five-star status that the hotel holds today. The philosophy of "bio" ("organic" in German) is so important to his vision for Stanglwirt, he added it to hotel’s name.

In addition to construction materials sourced from nature, Stanglwirt’s carpets are wool; mattresses are stuffed with wool and horse hair; and cotton and linen are the fabrics of choice for drapes, towels, sheets, bedspreads and upholstery. The hotel uses hydroelectric power, pumps water from mountain springs, harvests herbs and vegetables from its 247-acre farm nearby and maintains a herd of cows to produce beef, milk, cheese, butter, yogurt and cottage cheese. Housekeepers clean the rooms with nonchemical products, and a conscientious recycling program ensures discarded glass, metal and paper goods will have a new life.

For Hauser and his family, Stanglwirt is a second home, and the abundance of warm, homey touches reflects that feeling. Guests are greeted with Champagne and depart with a freshly baked miniature loaf of bread. There’s a treehouse on the lawn and an oversize dollhouse in one corridor. The library beckons with a fireplace, comfortable chairs and hundreds of books in English and German.

Every Hauser family member has a key role in operations. Balthasar oversees everything. His wife, Magdalena, is responsible for the interior decor and can often be found chatting with guests in the lobby.

Their son Richard directs daily operations. Johannes, who completed an internship at the Hale­ku­lani, is head of food and beverage. Maria manages marketing, public relations and special events, and Elisabeth is in charge of the stables, conferences and human resources. All four children learned the business from the ground up from the time they were young — cleaning rooms, mucking stalls, helping in the kitchen, working wherever they were needed when they weren’t in school.

Strolls through the property reveal delightful surprises. In the spa, for example, 35 species of colorful fish glide among real coral from Bali, Fiji and Australia in a 71⁄2-foot-deep, 16-foot-wide saltwater aquarium.

The original 400-year-old Gasthof (inn) on site has been preserved and is an alternative to the main restaurant; it has been open every day for the past 250 years, even through two world wars.

Guests can ask to be seated in the dining room where the famous "cowshed window" looks into the adjoining barn that houses the hotel’s 32 cows during the fall and winter.

Large windows beside the lobby bar provide a ringside view of the riding arena where the resident Lipizzaners (see sidebar) are trained and used for lessons. Balthasar Hauser had long admired those elegant horses, so in 1986 he bought the stallion Pluto Verona for $88,000 at a charity auction and began breeding Lipizzaners at Stanglwirt. The horses have since been one of the hotel’s biggest draws.

Over the years, countless luminaries have vacationed at the hotel — Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Arnold Schwar­ze­neg­ger, Ashley Judd and Shania Twain, to name a few — but celebrity or not, Stanglwirt can be the centerpiece of an extraordinary European holiday. It’s resplendent in winter white but truly a wonderland any time of the year.

Saving the Lipizzaners

The beautiful white Lipizzaner horses descend from hardy Barb horses brought by the Moors to Spain from Northern Africa in the seventh century. During the mid-1500s members of the ruling Habsburg family began breeding those horses with Spanish, Arabian and Andalusian stock, aiming to produce a strong, agile mount for use both in battle and at riding schools for the nobility of Central Europe.

The word “Lipizzaner” is derived from one of the Habsburgs’ first stud farms, located in the village of Lipica (spelled “Lipizza” in Italian) near Trieste in what is now Slovenia. For nearly 450 years the breed has been associated with the famed Spanish Riding School in Vienna, where the most gifted of its stallions are trained and star in public performances of classical dressage.’

During World War II in 1942 and 1943, most of the Lipizzaner breeding stock in Europe was moved to Nazi Germany’s stud farm in Hostau, Czechoslovakia. By spring 1945 the Soviet army was advancing toward Hostau. It was believed that if the Soviets took control of the farm, the horses would probably be slaughtered for food.

Col. Charles Reed, commander of the Second Cavalry, U.S. Third Army, learned about the threat from a prisoner of war — a German general who was a fellow horse lover. He urged Reed to rescue the horses from Hostau, which was just 35 miles away.

Thus, Operation Cowboy was launched. When Reed’s troops arrived at Hostau, they found more than 1,200 horses, including 375 Lipizzaners, most of them mares from farms in Austria and Yugoslavia that bred horses for the Spanish Riding School.

The success of Operation Cowboy ensured the Lipizzaner breed, the Spanish Riding School and a centuries-old tradition would endure. Reed later said, “We were so tired of death and destruction, we wanted to do something beautiful.”

Operation Cowboy is chronicled in the 1963 Walt Disney movie “Miracle of the White Stallions.”