Bunkers Disguised as Quaint Swiss Villas

What’s the best way to disguise a military bunker? Put something rather prosaic on top of it. Like a normal home, or better yet, a vacation home so that no one would get suspicious about it being empty. Photographer Christian Schwager identified and documented hundreds of “fake chalets” in Switzerland that were cleverly-hidden military installations of one kind or another.

Until 2004, camouflaged bunkers were a well-kept military secret in Switzerland and many Swiss residents had no idea that there were weapons compounds sitting in the middle of the villages where they grew up until Schwager’s book of photographs went public.
Christian estimates there are at least 250 bunkers hiding behind well-disguised facades that have gone unnoticed for years, sometimes sitting right on the main streets of town. He has visited photographed over a hundred of them, mainly from World War II when aerial reconnaissance and espionage was rife and the government began dressing up their not-so-subtle concrete bunkers.

After Schwager published a book of his photographs, more fake chalets were uncovered, and some, like the Villa Rose pictured above, were opened to the public as historical artifacts. See many more of the disguised military bunkers at Messy Nessy Chic.