Gstaad, one of Switzerland’s glitziest ski resorts, is buzzing with excitement over the opening of the first newly built five-star hotel for 100 years, the Alpina Gstaad. The world’s media have flown in to see if it lives up to the buzz while the town’s residents have been milling in the foyer, propping up the bar, testing out the spa and trying its restaurants.
The project took 15 years to come to fruition but the early signs are that this is a splendid addition to the resort’s ranks of starry establishments. One of the local residents, for instance, is already so enamoured of Megu, the Japanese restaurant that is an outpost of the New York flagship of the same name, that he arrives every day for lunch, ordering sushi and a SFr2,000 (£1,350) bottle of wine. Gstaad residents, you see, are like that: for most of them the wine they order is the wine they want. Price is not the issue.
The hotel, built at a cost of $337m, is a joint enterprise between Marcel Bach, a local farmer’s boy made good, and Jean-Claude Mimran, a French-Algerian businessman who has a home in Gstaad as well as ones in Geneva and Monte Carlo. It is built on a slight hill above the town, so every room has a balcony and views of the town or the mountains. There are 25 rooms and 31 suites, all larger and more interesting than its five-star competition. Many rooms have wood fires that come on at the flick of a switch and state-of-the-art lighting (new to me – and a great addition – is the shadowy light that comes on automatically in the bathroom as you enter in the dead of night, enough to show you the way but not enough to wake anybody else). But there are also old Swiss antiques and other Alpine touches (cowbells on some of the lights, goat-hair throws, weathered timber from old farmhouses in Saanenland and stone from the surrounding alps).