High style: inside the Rothschilds’ lavish new retreat in Megève | Financial Times

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FT Magazine Winter sports High style: inside the Rothschilds’ lavish new retreat in Megève

Recent years have seen the upper-crust resort fall into the shadow of flashier rivals. Can a new property help rouse the ‘sleeping beauty’?

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Simon Usborne OCTOBER 10, 2018

When a hotel operator strikes a deal with a landowner, each party tends to stick to what it does best. When the landlady is a baroness whose family not only owns the plot but also large parts of the ski resort it established almost a century ago — and a private bank with more than €150bn under management — the relationship is likely to be a little more hands-on. Ariane de Rothschild’s fingerprints are all over the new Four Seasons in Megève, the Canadian brand’s first hotel in the Alps, currently preparing for its second winter.

The reception desk, which looks as if it has been cleaved from a nearby glacier, is the work of Gilles Chabrier, the baroness’s preferred glass engraver. Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert, her favourite glass blower, spent more than a year creating cloud-like pendants for the bar and two-Michelin-starred restaurant, as well as the chandeliers for the gargantuan wine cellar, which has a glass staircase and room for 12,000 bottles.

“I’ve been buying glass since the age of 25,” de Rothschild tells me by phone from her office in Geneva, a few days after my visit to her £90m hotel. The 52-year-old married Benjamin de Rothschild in 1999 and is chief executive of his father’s Banque Privée Edmond de Rothschild (Benjamin, scion of the French branch of the Rothschild family, is chairman).

https://www.ft.com/content/b45ab49e-cb51-11e8-9fe5-24ad351828ab 1/8 She has added further warm touches to the hotel, which is built in timber and stone on the edge of the family’s Mont d’Arbois golf course, 10 minutes by road above Megève itself. In the corridors there are handwoven fabrics from Bali, and 120 abstract paintings by Thierry Bruet, who decorated the baroness’s apartments in Geneva, an hour down the Arve Valley.

Under the eye of luxury hotel veteran Pierre-Yves Rochon, who designed the interiors of The Savoy in London as well as the Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris, the magpie-luxe approach somehow works. It also reflects the effect de Rothschild hopes her latest investment will have on Megève, where strict planning regulations and low altitude have — until now — maintained a more understated, older-money air than you will find in the palace hotels of resorts such as Courchevel or St Moritz.

“It’s one thing to preserve this low-key feeling in Megève, and I hope we do, but we are also competing with other resorts and we need a different type of clientele,” de Rothschild explains. “Megève is like a sleeping beauty and it was time to wake her up — because, at some point, if you sleep too much you disappear.”

The Four Seasons Megève. Main picture: the horse-drawn carriage that takes guests to the piste © Richard Waite Megève was at its sleepiest before 1920, when Benjamin’s grandmother Noémie de Rothschild sent her Norwegian ski instructor to the French Alps to find a future rival to St Moritz in Switzerland. Trygve Smith recommended Megève, a modest farming town where a nascent tourist trade had ended with the first world war. He had been struck by its gently sloped meadows, views of Mont Blanc and easy access from Geneva.

De Rothschild bought a home on the sun-kissed slopes of Mont d’Arbois, just above the village, and after the second world war, Megève became an exclusive playground for wealthy French sophisticates. By the 1950s, Jean Cocteau is purported to have nicknamed it “the 21st arrondissement of Paris”.

https://www.ft.com/content/b45ab49e-cb51-11e8-9fe5-24ad351828ab 2/8 A handful of hotels emerged on and beyond Megève’s charming cobbled square. The Mont-Blanc, perhaps the most famous of these, is now owned by the Sibuets, another well-heeled Megève family, whose expanding, eponymous hotel brand also includes the renowned nearby chalet conversion Les Fermes de Marie.

Up at the golf course, the de Rothschilds still own the Chalet du Mont d’Arbois, which became a hotel in the 1960s (and whose rooms have been renovated for this season as part of a major refurbishment). But until now there has been no outside interest from the big brands of the luxury world in this confined, conservative valley. “When we saw a high upswing in resorts like Courchevel, Megève was determined to stay as it was,” de Rothschild says.

© Michael Parkin What new money has come to the resort in recent years has mainly gone into converting old homes and small hotels into luxury apartments. “The old two-star hotels have gone now,” says Elizabeth Kinnear of family-run Stanford Skiing, a British-based Megève specialist founded in the 1980s. She says the de Rothschilds’ rarefied influence had never dominated the farming town, but the buying up of properties is changing it.

I took the Four Seasons shuttle down into town one afternoon. Its easy charm was plain to see. Yes, there were touristy horse-drawn carriages and expensive pet boutiques (“la mode pour votre chien”) but there were also snotty five-year-olds in snowsuits and families bearing grocery bags. My coffee at the popular Bistrot de Megève cost €2.50. https://www.ft.com/content/b45ab49e-cb51-11e8-9fe5-24ad351828ab 3/8 Despite the risk of further change, Kinnear, who started out as a chalet girl in Megève almost 30 years ago, welcomes the new hotel. “None of us can run a ski resort without people here to spend money and buy lift passes,” she says. “People visiting their apartments for a week each year aren’t great for the village.”

A retired de Rothschild bank executive began discussing a new hotel with Four Seasons more than a decade ago. The baroness was convinced that a well-known brand could introduce the resort to a new clientele in a fraught, competitive market, while also allowing her to preserve a certain Megèvian modesty. There would be only 55 rooms (the Four Seasons in Whistler has 273) and the vast spa and pool would be built in art-deco style to honour Noémie. The hotel would also remain open in summer, partly to serve the golf course.

François Arrighi arrived to open and manage the property, fresh from the George V in Paris (and, before that, Les Airelles, one of Courchevel’s celebrated palaces). De Rothschild, meanwhile, transplanted the two-Michelin-star restaurant Le 1920 from the Chalet du Mont d’Arbois to her new hotel, where young chef Julien Gatillon does remarkable things with globe artichokes and langoustines. He also oversees Kaito, Megève’s first Japanese restaurant, while Bar Edmond is the place for afternoon tea or a glass of house white — the house being Château Lafite Rothschild (the cellar is filled with vintages stretching back as far as 1869).

One of the suites at the Four Seasons Megève © Richard Waite Of course, modesty is relative when rooms are priced at an average €1,500 per night during winter (half the Courchevel equivalent, Arrighi points out). Visitors have so far flocked from the Middle East, Russia and Brazil.

https://www.ft.com/content/b45ab49e-cb51-11e8-9fe5-24ad351828ab 4/8 And the skiing? Well, there were piles of new snow but thick cloud concealed Mont Blanc and everything below it. I put on my boots anyway, and took a pair of powder skis from the ski room to see what I could find (not much). Sitting alone in low visibility on the rickety old chair lift up to Mont Joly, the Four Seasons pool felt rather inviting.

The new hotel boasts, among other things, that it is Megève’s first ski-in, ski-out property. But a 500m unpaved road stands between it and the gentle piste that leads to the Mont d’Arbois lift. A Four Seasons horse and carriage shuttles guests along it (experienced skiers will find it quicker to push and skate). There are plans to put in a short lift that would take guests slightly higher up the adjacent piste, with a groomed slope back to the hotel. In the meantime, I peered through the gloom as I approached and, spotting the swimming pool steam, made the last turns of a short day through the trees to the ski-room door.

The pool at the Four Seasons Megève © Richard Waite Four Seasons arguably represents a view from the top end of the ski market to a post-skiing future, insured against climate change, weather and seasonal swings in demand. Arrighi tells me that he sees his main competitor, particularly for Middle Eastern guests, not as the grand hotels of Courchevel, which are shuttered for much of the year, but those of Geneva. He guesses that about half of the guests find no use for his new ski room.

In the meantime, the baroness’s plan to shake up her family’s “sleeping beauty”, including its approach to planning applications, is working. In 2020, Accor Hotel Group is due to open the 150- bed, four-star Le Meztiva in town, while the French Sezz group, best known for its swanky five-star hotel in St Tropez, plans to open L’Hôtel Le Comte Capré not far from the Four Seasons itself. “I think you can say that we are forcing everybody to raise their level,” the baroness tells me, before returning to her desk.

https://www.ft.com/content/b45ab49e-cb51-11e8-9fe5-24ad351828ab 5/8 Simon Usborne was a guest of Four Seasons Hotel Megève (fourseasons.com). Double rooms start at €850 per night in winter season and €500 per night in summer More five-star skiing

Le Massif, Courmayeur Over on the Italian side of Mont Blanc, Courmayeur has a new five-star hotel this winter. The 80- room Le Massif boasts a lavish spa and central location but its real selling point is up on the mountain. At Chécrouit, the hub of the ski area 1,700m above sea level, guests will be able to relax and recharge at the Loge du Massif, a restaurant, lounge, ski room and kids’ club. Doubles from €350; lemassifcourmayeur.com Hide Hotel, Flims Due to open on December 15, The Hide eschews wood panelling and other alpine clichés for a moody mid-century style, created by award-winning Swedish studio Stylt Trampoli. The 47 rooms use bold colour schemes and rich fabrics; all have terraces. The property is part of the new Stenna development of apartments and shops, right beside the ski lift. Doubles from SFr200; Powder Byrne has packages. thehideflims.ch; powderbyrne.com Daria-I Nor, Alpe d’Huez Like Val Thorens, Alpe d’Huez is moving upmarket — its high altitude making it an increasingly safe long-term bet for investors in the face of climate change. This winter it is due to get what will be only its second five-star, the 37-bedroom Daria-I Nor, offering a large spa, two swimming pools and a gastronomic restaurant led by chef Stéphane Tarabla. Doubles from €195; Ski Solutions has packages. hotel-dariainor.com; skisolutions.com

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