How a family-run affair brought beats to the alps for A Winter Garden

Field Maneuvers, often whispered about as the UK’s best-kept secret, began as a 400-person, friends-of-friends affair. Events such as Green Man and Secret Garden Party built their reputations on the glowing descriptions of people who were there when it was ‘tiny’. Glastonbury began with just 1,500 attendees, lured in by £1 tickets and the promise of free milk from the farm.

The festival landscape in 2026 is a different beast to the seventies, of course, but there was something genuinely thrilling about catching a festival as it made its debut. A Winter Garden is a new venture from the family team behind Croatia’s much-loved The Garden resort, transplanted to the slopes of Austria’s Obertauern ski resort. While the likes of Snowbombing, Snowboxx and Rise court large crowds with flashy production and more mainstream bookings, A Winter Garden pitches itself at the other end of the spectrum: a more intimate affair with wellness at its heart, anchored by a tight but well-curated dance music programme.

What made the three-day festival unique was its setting: everything took place within a single hotel – where guests sleep, eat, party and spa, all under one roof. One exception to this is the festival’s slope-side après bar, where Berlin-based DJ Dragana and Croatian Ilija Rudman deliver a bruising selection of acid and Chicago house into the darkening mountains. By night, the hotel lobby transforms into a dimly-lit lounge bar, with South African jazz talent Guru Logic setting the mood with deep grooves and piano. At the rooftop of the hotel, DJs including Peach and Gerd Janson play at a pop-up version of The Garden’s beloved disco Barbarella’s, with black velvet curtains enclosing the dancefloor.

“It was a toe in the water, to get like-minded people together,” explains co-organiser Nick Colgan (pictured above), a towering Brummie man often adorned with a beret, of the 2025 edition which was held in December. The festival has an echo of the start of the couple’s journey into the live events industry. Nick and his partner Charlotte went on a two-week holiday to Croatia back in 2003, and one year later they’d uprooted to Zadar, opening The Garden Lounge bar. “it was six years after the war had finished, and there was a whole generation of people that didn't really understand the geography of Croatia,” Colgan says. “I certainly didn't know about the coastline. It was also very difficult to get to, because there were no flights going to the coast. There was no motorway. What we wanted to do was share this secret we'd stumbled across.”

In 2006 they invited a bunch of friends, family and music industry colleagues to the first iteration of the festival. It was a steep learning curve. “I remember sitting with Charlotte the day after it finished, and thinking, ‘I'll never, ever do that again!' I remember waking up – well, I don't think we’d been to bed – on the first morning and saying, ‘OK, who's organised clean-up?’ and of course no one had. But it was everybody chipping in, and it was this really nice feeling.”

In the weeks following that, people kept contacting the couple, saying they should put it on again. Thirteen years later, and a total of eight festivals are happening on their resort in 2026, including Dimensions, Dekmantel Selectors, and Love International (who helped curate the line-up for A Winter Garden). The pair also own a brewery in Zagreb, and their Garden lager is flowing on tap at the hotel.

Yet you might wonder why the family would want to add anything else to their plate. Colgan is in the process of handing over the reins of the events side of the business to his son, Ben (“he’s got a natural talent for it, he loves it”). It’s also a tricky time to be launching a new event series. In 2024, at least 60 festivals were postponed or cancelled, and festivals are still finding huge difficulties. A recent report found that 28% of established festivals report rising production costs as their most significant challenge. The first edition was, in some ways, a living example of that difficulty. Tickets were available in advance, but sales had clearly struggled, and the majority of attendees were friends, family, industry contacts and press.

Colgan is candid about it: December, the only slot available for the inaugural event, was “always going to be a battle” thanks to everyone’s dwindling finances ahead of Christmas. Their future events, he says, are going to be held in March, when snow conditions are at their best and wallets have recovered, and he’ll be tweaking the programme. For him, running a ski festival was turning what he’s familiar with – sun, sea and balmy Croatian evenings – “on its head”, and he quickly realised that “doing club nights until two o'clock in the morning is just an impossibility” when you’re up early the next day to hit the slopes.

Obertauern as a location feels right for this type of event. Skiing is typically a pursuit for the elite, but the resort has a different, less pretentious energy – fewer Gucci salopettes and Jeroboams of champagne, more wooden huts blasting German Schlager hits (if you’ve never encountered the music of Tobee, consider yourself fortunate). The town has a music history of its own, as the place where The Beatles filmed scenes for Help! – although at the time, the locals were largely unimpressed by the Fab Four, many apparently never having heard of them. The resort is “proper old-school,” says Colgan, explaining how Obertauern is owned by three families and still has a very intimate feel, an echo, perhaps, of the family's own dealings two countries over.

Where A Winter Garden really distinguishes itself is in its wellness offerings – nothing quite hits the spot like a sauna or jacuzzi for weary limbs after a day of snowsports and late nights – and in the breakfast and dinner buffets, which are elaborate, indulgent affairs (ideal for rakija hangovers), where you might find yourself sitting elbow-to-elbow with a DJ who played the night before. “Everything we do has got the same core values, you know, and truths that we follow,” Colgan says, “like quality, inclusivity. There's no VIPs in anything we do.”

The 2025 iteration turns out to be more of a proof of concept, rather than a full festival, but Colgan's plan is always to put on something boutique (“for want of a better word!” he laughs). “I always think, I'd rather do eight events at a smaller capacity that are more intimate [than something bigger].”

He talks about working with local business owners in a thoughtful way that shows his vision isn’t simply transplanting a load of rowdy Brits and Croats into a sleepy Austrian town. His events have become “more of a holiday with a musical backdrop, rather than the other way around,” he says. “They're not going there to see big headline DJs, they're going there because it's this intimate affair where DJs and festival goers alike mix together on a daily basis.”