When I was last in Verbier, vin chaud would satisfy most of the resort’s winter visitors. Five years later, the Swiss ski resort is gearing up for a different kind of clientele. Symptomatic of this change is Tara Club, the once scruffy late night haunt just off the Place Centrale. It’s been transformed into the Coco Club, a glitzy, subterranean boîte in cream, black and gold with leather banquettes and hostesses in sequined mini-dresses.
The drinks list includes an eight-person cocktail comprising a magnum of Krug Grande Cuvée, Hennessey Paradis and “secret elixirs” presented in a hand-carved ice chalet with a sterling-silver key fob offering lifetime membership to the club. As an exercise in PR it is certainly eye-catching; with a price tag of £4,287 it also tips into the absurd.
“The Russians are coming,” explains Yan Felder, a Verbier-based concierge providing bespoke services from residency permits to off-piste Champagne picnics: “Verbier [is] a VIP resort. Yet we’re not getting so many new people that it’s changing the tone. Verbier still feels discreet, a place where the extremely wealthy can wear jeans, not fur, and where the locals don’t talk about who’s in town.” People who know Verbier love it for all this and, of course, the sport: more than 400 kilometres of piste in four different valleys with huge amounts of free riding. So yes, Verbier might have some of the best chalets in the Alps but, as Felder says, “it also remains kind of cool, simple, for the sportive rich”.
When I visit, in the first week of the current season, I don’t see many of the Russians in evidence. More the sportive rich – hedge fund managers from Geneva, bankers from London. But I do notice signs of change, with a conspicuous slew of luxury openings, from spas to shops to luxury chalets, which indicate Verbier’s flashier riches.
There’s the Nevai hotel with sunken seating in the white-floored lobby-lounge, its sleek VIP snug lined in red velvet banquettes, and the penthouse suite in black lacquer and white with an open fire and outdoor Jacuzzi. Or the Coskun Gallery, where you can pick up an original, one-off or screenprint by Lichtenstein, Miró or Warhol.
The wellness scene has also upped the ante. In the next few weeks, Solmai spa will make its debut with a state-of-the-art gym, healthy all-day brasserie-lounge, six treatment rooms (skin and body rejuvenation treatments, including Ayurveda) and extensive consultation and relaxation areas. On the beauty side, it will offer non-surgical chemical peels and alpha-hydroxy acid (AHA) skin treatments. This almost medical commitment to skin rejuvenation will be carried through to the body: for upwards of £450 you can have a head-to-toe chemical peel. Warren Smith, British professional skier and performance coach, will be running one-on-one training programmes in off-mountain biomechanics. This is all from former hedge funder Lyndon Hunt, a Canadian with one of Verbier’s best chalets to rent (also called Solmai, sleeping 18 with a staff of six).
Verbier has seen a boom in super-chalets to rent, some of which are commanding weekly price tags in excess of £30,000. Until recently, the private chalet-dominated resort created issues of access; the best properties were generally circulated between friends, creating a wall to outsiders. Unlike St Moritz and Gstaad, Verbier has no Palace Hotel as an alternative.
Septième Ciel has been one of Verbier’s better known private chalet rentals: slick, with a modern wood and layered slate finish, sleeping 12. Its pièce de résistance is the village view that twinkles below at night as you hang out in the outdoor hot tub on the terrace. Septième Ciel, from £16,150 per week, is available for rent through London-ski specialist Ski Verbier, which also offers Chalet Cheyenne, costing from £12,750 per week and sleeping 10. The warm interiors have rough plaster walls, outsized copper lamps and lichen-covered wash basins hewn from stone. Sparse wall decorations include exhibition print landscape photography by British-born Jimmy Nelson. It’s comfortable, homely and understated, with high Princess and the Pea mattresses and a Tuscan-esque sitting room-kitchen dominated by a vast open fire.
Chalet Kernow, another relatively new contender (from £18,500 per week, sleeping 14) is one notch above, belonging to Charlie Berman, a British banker, and his wife, Liz, who are among the new owners of Verbier’s perennially popular mountain restaurant, Chez Danny.
Liz Berman has done Kernow’s interiors with decorator Marion Lichtig: antique linen sheets dyed with natural indigo, grey cashmere bed throws, iPod docking stations, balconies with Adirondack chairs, a sauna, mezzanine with billiards table, double-height sitting-dining room and a five-star bunk room for the kids.
Although privately owned and run (most owners give up their chalets to outside management companies), Kernow comes with uniformed staff.
All the above are mountain huts in comparison to the main player for 2008: The Lodge, Verbier, which sleeps 18 adults and six children (in a separate bunk room with flat-screen, DVD player and PlayStation). Now owned by Sir Richard Branson, it’s in an appealing location, two minutes walk from the main ski lift at Médran (not that you’ll have to tackle this in ski boots; the chalet comes with a full-time driver).
The chalet occupies five storeys, all connected with a lift, the top three taken up by en suite doubles, each large enough to constitute a junior suite compared with a hotel.
But it’s the living space which makes Branson’s latest property stand out, including a lower ground floor with a bar, games area with pool table, a sitting room with wide day-beds, a black slate-walled indoor pool, Jacuzzi, spa and sauna (an in-house masseuse is included in the staff of six).
The styling, by Kelly Hoppen’s protégée, Fiona Barratt, is an un-chintzy mix of pale, greyish wood, plain linens and leathers in natural colours. This makes the chalet cosy, despite all those floor-to-ceiling windows and snowy balconies (one of which has an outdoor Jacuzzi). With this much going for it, you can expect a high price tag: the chalet rents on an exclusive basis from £35,520 to £59,000 per week.
Which makes the one essential to any ski holiday seem like good value: your own personal ski instructor and guide, which in Switzerland, cost in the region of €300 daily.
There’s no greater luxury on the slopes than having someone else unpick a piste map. In the company of a certified instructor, clients can use separate, shorter lift queues. They’ll also book your mountain restaurant and keep you safe on any off-piste foray.
Of the smaller companies used to dealing with private clients, turn to Altitude, founded by a band of British ski and snowboard champions, or Adrenaline.
It’s bad slope etiquette, I know, but how nice is it to have someone else carry your skis while you rearrange your sunglasses?
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Address book
Coco Club: www.cococlub.ch
Yan Felder at Les Clefs d’Or: yanfelder@hotmail.com
Nevai: www.nevai.ch
Coskun Gallery: www.coskun.ch
Solmai: www.thepowderco.com and www.solmai.com
Septième Ciel and Chalet Cheyenne: www.skiverbier.com
Chalet Kernow: www.ckverbier.com
The Lodge, Verbier: www.thelodge.virgin.com
Altitude: www.altitude-extreme.com
Adrenaline: www.adrenaline-verbier.ch
