Villa Beaulieu

Nomad's ninth Swiss edition ran from the 12th to the 15th of February 2026, again in the former Klinik Gut in St. Moritz, which has now been renovated and re-opened under the name Villa Beaulieu. The building was not, twelve months ago, a residence; now it is, or is pretending to be. Walls have been replastered. Radiators have been replaced. Floors that were orthopaedic-hospital linoleum have been stripped back to pine. The post-hospital uncanniness of the 2025 edition has been sanded away. In its place is a nearly-domestic, nearly-private atmosphere that is much closer to the house-as-exhibition tradition Nomad has leaned into at Monaco and Venice.

The trade-off is real. What was distinctive about the 2025 Klinik Gut edition, the sense of objects briefly occupying a building in the middle of becoming something else, is now replaced by something more rehearsed. That is fine, but it is different. Nomad's co-founder and director Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte has built a career on knowing which buildings to find, and Villa Beaulieu is what the Klinik Gut has grown up into. The fair leans into the new cosmetic rather than resisting it.

The gallery list was strong. Nilufar was there with a Carlo Mollino desk and a Martino Gamper chair. Pierre Marie Giraud had a tight room of Japanese ceramics: Yuuki Tanaka, a late Kazunori Hamana vase. Von Bartha had brought a Matheus Chiaratti, a new Brazilian painter whose work I had not seen before and wanted to take home. Monica De Cardenas had a small Nicola De Maria piece that would have looked right next to a Twombly. Robilant+Voena had a Morandi. Spazio Nobile had a very fine Ann Van Hoey porcelain grouping. Secci, Cortesi, Brun Fine Art, all with strong booths. A few newer galleries from Warsaw, Athens, San Sebastián and Cairo had been added to the rotation, which is the right move for a fair that needs, over time, to widen its centre of gravity beyond the Milan-Paris-Brussels axis.

The objects did what Nomad objects do. You do not come to Nomad for discovery in the sense of never-before-shown work. You come for confirmation, which is a different and less fashionable thing. To see pieces you had read about or seen once, in a well-lit room with a dealer you trust, with a glass of alpine Nebbiolo in your hand. The fair is a twice-a-year appointment. Its audience is an appointment audience. Both sides know it. The room acknowledged it.

The atmosphere of a Nomad weekend in St. Moritz is specific. The mountains are white. The town is quiet, or was quiet on the Friday. A few skiers had come off the piste and into the fair in ski-boots, which the staff had decided, wisely, not to make a fuss about. Bellavance-Lecompte was visible in most of the rooms, talking with dealers, with the practised calm of a director whose fair has figured itself out.

Nomad's next outing will be in Hamptons in early summer. The St. Moritz edition, in its new and more domestic register, will return in February 2027. The risk the fair now faces is not that its venue is wrong, but that its venue has been finessed into something that looks like every other high-end interior. The cure for that, which Nomad knows but has to keep deciding to apply, is editorial discipline. It had it this year. I expect it will have it next.