The Houses of Davos: A Directory

Ask anyone who works meeting week and they will talk about 'the houses'. During the week, hotels, shopfronts and pop-up structures along the town's main street are taken over and rebranded for a few days — a bank becomes a lounge, a watch boutique becomes a stage, a restaurant becomes a country's pavilion. Collectively these are the houses of Davos, and they are where most of the week's public-facing programme happens. None of them are the official Congress sessions; all of them sit around the meeting rather than inside it.

It helps to sort them into four kinds. National pavilions — the house of a country — showcase an economy and host state-level receptions and investment pitches; they are among the most visible addresses on the street. Thematic hubs organise the conversation by subject rather than by flag: a house built around artificial intelligence, a climate or energy hub, a health or longevity space. Media houses are the broadcasters' studios and stages, where much of the interview footage you see afterwards is recorded. And corporate pavilions turn a single company's storefront into a week-long headquarters for its own meetings and salons.

Reading the houses before you travel is the single highest-return hour of preparation. The clearest way to do it is to look at who was present last time: our archive of the 2026 week records the houses that ran and the venues they occupied, and the current directory of organisers shows who is building programmes this year. Themes and sponsors shift, but the geography and the cast are remarkably stable year to year.

Access follows the same tiers as any Davos room and often varies floor by floor within a single house: some spaces are open and you can walk in, some gate by online registration, some by application, and the marquee dinners by invitation only. A house being 'open' rarely means every event inside it is — read each session, not the building. The mechanics of earning a place are covered in our companion guide on getting into the side events, and the badge question in Davos badges and access, decoded.

Almost every house sits on or a few steps off the Promenade, or inside the central hotels, so the whole directory is walkable — see The Davos Promenade, Explained for how the street is laid out. Plan visits by walking time using the interactive map, and if you are matching houses to the people you want to meet, cross-reference the speakers appearing that week and the communities that convene around each theme. Build a shortlist of the three or four houses that actually serve your objective and let the rest of the street be scenery.

One caution on names. Houses rename, change sponsors, or skip a year, and a house that dominated one January can be gone the next. Treat any list — including ours — as a snapshot to verify, not a fixture. When plans firm up, tell our team what you are trying to achieve and we will map it to the rooms that are actually running.