- Cas Gasi -
Authentic living

There are times when one walks into a chain restaurant or hotel and senses something missing. It may be very elegant and have a good reputation but there is always an air of imitation, an idea that this same elegance has been replicated again and again under the same name in various locations. Despite any apparent beauty, the places simply have no heart. When something truly comes from the heart it is very difficult to disguise it. You know it when you see it.

Cas Gasi is all heart. That’s what happens when the authenticity is simply a by-product of a life lived. The hotel staff are not chosen based on which hospitality school they went to but more on their own personal interests. “I look for the way people interact with others and for personality as well as professionalism,” Cas Gasi owner, Margaret von Korff explains. “People who are interested in other people. They want to connect and you can’t do that with someone who is not being themselves.”

Margaret herself evolved into a hotelier simply by understanding what people look for in a hotel through her own experiences. The same goes for the hotel’s interior design – a designer has never been engaged and everything you see has a story behind it. Authenticity comes from a deep need to be exactly who you are, no pretention, no arrogance, just being. And that is Cas Gasi.

The concept of authenticity gets tossed about a lot these days, a favourite hashtag of the twitter generation, trotted out to sell everything from sneakers to smart phones. The dictionary definition of the word authentic is: of undisputed origin, not a copy, genuine. True authenticity is lived, as the Greek philosopher Epictetus said: “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.” Never is that more an apparent axiom then when stepping through the doors of Cas Gasi.