Is Val d’Isère becoming the new Courchevel?

Five minutes after I step into my room, there comes a knock at the door. A chambermaid dressed in a ruffled white tunic with a red apron and white gloves holds forth a tray of frosted bottles with silver orbs for caps. Like everything in this new monument to Alpine luxury, the uniform has been chosen by the hotel’s mercurial owner, a statuesque French woman called Séverine Pétilaire-Bellet.

“Monsieur Usborne, would you like me to perfume your room?” the maid asks. I can chose from four scents from Guerlain, the Paris perfumer, including Eau de Bain, Eau de Lit and — somewhat off-puttingly for me (although, I must admit, I am not schooled in the art of room scents) — Eau de Lingerie.

“Do we want the rooms perfuming?” I shout through the 100 sq-metre suite at my brother, who is exploring his tennis-court-sized bathroom. I don’t hear a reply, and politely decline. My medieval-themed digs — yours for up to €4,000 a night in peak season — are fragrant enough, I decide, with a not unpleasant fug of new, slightly smoky wood and something faintly vanilla-ish.

If we feel a little out of place — and we do — it is partly because the awkwardly titled hotel, officially “Airelles Val d’Isère, Mademoiselle”, has landed in the resort this winter like an oligarch’s wife at a boisterous après-ski happy hour. The 41-bedroom hotel is a sister to Les Airelles Courchevel, a fairytale folly that opened in 1992 and played a key role in putting that resort on the map for the international super-rich. In 2011, it became one of only eight hotels in France to be granted the newly launched “Palace” status. From Courchevel to Val d’Isère is only 17 miles as the crow flies, yet the attempt to airlift a business model over the Grande Motte glacier has raised eyebrows here.

While they may sit at similar altitudes above 1,800 metres, a cultural chasm separates Val d’Isère and the rarefied air of Courchevel’s wooded “Jardin Alpin”, where the marmots might as well be perfumed. “Val”, as Brits have known it for generations (and they make up almost half the visitors here), has always been a no-nonsense skiers’ resort. I first came with my parents about 25 years ago, when we squeezed into a tiny apartment overlooking a noisy roundabout. For us — and armies of cake-baking, bed-swapping chalet boys and girls — Val has long been a low-key Alpine haven of free-flowing beer, snow and melted cheese. It has never been a resort for posing or conspicuous excess.

If we feel a little out of place, it’s partly because the hotel has landed in the resort this winter like an oligarch’s wife at a boisterous après-ski happy hour

Certainly, very fancy chalets and restaurants have quietly proliferated, but the smartest shops bear the names North Face and Patagonia, not Cartier or Prada. And while there are a handful of five-star hotels — most notably Le Blizzard and Les Barmes de l’Ours — bigger players have stayed away, until now. Because big money is starting to blow through the valley, and while the Mademoiselle feels out of place this winter, Pétilaire-Bellet may have cannily positioned Airelles at the front of a new wave. The property market has already been heating fast as investors, increasingly aware of climate change, look for new, high-altitude opportunities with surer snow. Savills tells me premium chalet prices in Val d’Isère have leapt by 90 per cent in the past five years.

A short walk from the Airelles, the old Hotel Moris and pub of the same name — latterly a rough-and-ready Mark Warner chalet — has been shuttered ready for demolition. A new hotel, part of Le K2 Collections, another high-luxe import from Courchevel, is due to open next winter in its place. Meanwhile, in a stark symbol of an upmarket shift, the champagne house Louis Roederer has snapped up the family-run Hôtel Christiania, one of the oldest hotels in Val d’Isère. The company’s plans for its first hotel are not yet known, but don’t expect an après-ski two-for-one on Cristal.

“A lot of people were saying to me, ‘Mademoiselle, Courchevel is full all the time’,” Pétilaire-Bellet tells me later that evening at Joia, one of two restaurants in the new hotel. After sweeping in wearing a woollen military cape and a pair of Sorel trainers, she was keen to make clear her central role in the hotel’s mythology. “I am Mademoiselle,” she confirms in a whisper.

Pétilaire-Bellet joined the original Les Airelles, Courchevel, as manager in 2002 and stayed on when Stéphane Courbit, a French media mogul, bought and transformed it in 2007. His LOV Group has since developed hotels in Provence and St Tropez. Venice is next in their expansion after the planned opening this May of Le Grand Contrôle, a hotel inside the grounds of the Château de Versailles.

In 2015, Pétilaire-Bellet heard that the Brussels, an old four-star hotel in Val d’Isère, with a prime ski-in, ski-out location, might be up for sale. She convinced Courbit, and three other investors whom Airelles prefers not to name, to throw in an undisclosed mountain of cash to demolish the Brussels and rebuild. Pétilaire-Bellet, who is the new hotel’s associate owner and manager, had carte blanche to design it. There would be no place for mid-century cool or Swiss-chalet pastiche. “I love the Middle Ages — the literature and the style and heart of it,” she says after waving away an untouched squid ink risotto with roasted octopus (it has been sitting too long while we chat, by her estimation. A waiter fetches a fresh one). “Why would we want to be like every luxury hotel in New York or Stockholm? We are at 2,000 metres — this should be an escape.”

High stone fireplaces and dark wood mix with tapestries and shelves of antique books, as well as plush new linen sofas. The medieval chic theme, which stops just short of Disney territory, continues in the basement with a sprawling spa. In the giant ski room, butlers will help you in and out of your boots.

Pétilaire-Bellet has breathed Courchevel air for almost 20 years, and knew the move would be fraught. After a summer of frantic construction, rumours have swirled of tricky plumbing, recalcitrant lifts and iffy service. I had been due to join a group of journalists there in mid-December only for the hotel to cancel the trip three days before my flight. Minor mis-steps during my stay include a disappointing stuffed chicken at Joia and peculiar evasion at reception when I ask for a tour of the penthouses.

These problems will be ironed out, I’m sure, but for an even grander opening in Val d’Isère, I look up the mountain. The Refuge de Solaise is a new hotel, spa and restaurant at more than 2,500 metres, partly occupying the top station of the old Solaise cable car (which ran from 1942 until 2016). Its opening has been delayed a whole winter; it’s not easy building on a mountainside. Nor is it easy — or even possible — to check in when high winds shut down the sleek new Solaise gondola, the Refuge’s umbilical link to the resort.

I spend my last night instead at Le Blizzard for a taste of old luxury by Val d’Isère standards. Beatrice and Pierre Cerboneschi have cultivated the hotel’s air of relaxed sophistication since the early 1960s, turning its classy bar into an après-ski institution. The couple say hello over dinner at La Luge, the hotel’s delightful fondue restaurant. Attila, their uncommonly large golden retriever, settles at my feet. Beatrice is gracefully diplomatic about the brash new hotel up the road but knows she will only benefit from the rising tide. “We will go to have a look soon,” she says with a wink.

Before the storm came in, I skied with Jean-Jacques Arbona, a veteran Val d’Isère instructor. He settled here in 1992 when the Winter Olympics blasted cash and optimism through the resorts of the Savoie. In almost springlike sunshine, we skied a classic Val d’Isère off-piste itinerary over the Col Pers into the Gorges de Malpasset, where holes in the snow above the river threaten to swallow up errant skiers. A thin layer of Saharan sand, deposited by a recent southerly wind, had tinged the mountainscape like a gently blowtorched meringue.

Arbona had watched in awe last summer as construction boomed in Val d’Isère. He stopped counting cranes at 28. More are due imminently: delayed plans for a new layout in the centre of town are regathering pace. Arbona had not yet ventured beyond Mademoiselle’s ski room to sample a €22 Guerlain branded cocktail or €32 burger, but he felt confident wealthy arrivistes would either represent a curious minority — or would still be skiers above all else.

Those who come for any other reason have so far struggled. Pétilaire-Bellet told me an American guest of hers from Courchevel arrived in Val d’Isère to try the new hotel, only to request a helicopter ride back to Courchevel for a couple of hours one afternoon. “She said, ‘Séverine, I love the place but I need to shop, I need to shop!’”

Yet Pétilaire-Bellet is also convinced she can attract a different kind of very wealthy skier. She is enjoying the relative diversity of Val d’Isère, which she explains in the way only a Courchevel hotelier could. “In Courchevel you pay €30 for a plate of fries and you know you are sitting between two other billionaires,” she says. “Here you pay €12.50 maximum and you are still a billionaire, because there are a lot of them hiding here in les chalets, but you might be sitting next to a family who have saved up for 11 months for their holiday.”

After a last morning of sensational tree skiing in deep snow at Le Fornet, where the cable car is still open, the storm finally eases. I make a dash for the reopening Solaise lift for a quick Caesar salad up at the Refuge before my return to Geneva. It is an extraordinary feat of contemporary design and high-altitude engineering, with exposed concrete, warm fabrics and a stunning 25-metre swimming pool.

Thick cloud and snow still obscure my view from the restaurant down to Val d’Isère, where the Mademoiselle crouches awkwardly on the pistes. Her stark new wood and stone exterior may take a few more years to blend into the mountainscape. But come summer the cranes will spring up again like sunflowers as one of the world’s best-known ski resorts continues its gradual climb upmarket. Unless you request otherwise, the rooms will be perfumed.

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Letter in response to this article:

In these days waste not, want not applies, and that includes squid ink risotto / From David Cox, London SW18, UK