BACKGROUND
The Swiss playground of the rich and famous is marking 150 years since a celebrated hotelier opened his doors to British visitors in winter. And so, 150 years ago, the Swiss hotelier and the English tourists created what would become Europe’s first winter holiday resort and an Alpine playground for the international wealthy and famous.
The 2014-5 season, which opens next weekend, will be celebrated with a comprehensive programmer of events marking the town’s glorious past and intended as a thank-you to those first visitors.
It was considered a hoot to hurtle along the village streets on sleds and sleighs, terrifying the locals. Eventually the British were persuaded to build a proper bob run, much to everyone’s relief. They later formed the Tobogganing Club & The Cresta Run – male-only since 1929. The regulations they drew up would form the basis of Olympic sports and are still detailed in neatly typed documents at a tiny museum above the kindergarten in nearby Celerina.
As was their wont, the English gentlemen formed exclusive clubs, many of which still exist, such as the Shuttlecock, only open to those who have been unceremoniously ejected from the Cresta Run on the notorious Shuttlecock bend. Today, St Moritz is home to more than 5,000 people – 38% of them foreign – but getting there is still a trek for those lacking private jet or helicopter.
It takes the best part of four hours by train from Zurich. From the regional capital, Chur, the Red Train wends its way up through the mountains of what was once marketed as “Heidi-land” on a single-track Unesco-listed route of breathtaking beauty to Switzerland’s highest station.
The ubiquitous ski-hire shops of most Alpine resorts are curiously absent, despite the town having twice hosted the Winter Olympics (1928 and 1948) and being set to host the World Ski Championships, for the fifth time, in 2017. Instead, visitors are confronted with the luxury offerings of Louis Vuitton, Tom Ford, Gucci, Miu Miu and the rest.
Badrutt’s pension Faller is now the Kulm hotel, a five-star palace acquired by Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos in 1968 to avoid it falling into the hands of the French group Club Med, whose family empire now owns large swaths of St Moritz.
And Badrutt, its original owner and the man who, incidentally, also brought electricity to the town, has gone from simple hotelier to local hero. In his original larch-panelled living room, little changed since the 19th century, Heinz E Hunkeler, the manager at Kulm, pulled a stack of black and white photographs from a cupboard with the careless mien of a man not given to nostalgia.
His hotel, he said, is unashamedly grand and very St Moritz, but has changed with the times. “This is a unique hotel and nothing can change that, but it is not stuffy or dusty. Before, a tie was a must after 7pm but people don’t want to come on holiday and wear a tie, though you still have to wear a jacket,” Hunkeler said. “St Moritz doesn’t want to be too chic and champagne but the fact is we don’t have many B&Bs or one-star hotels because the place has a certain cachet. If there was more mass tourism it wouldn’t be St Moritz.”
Though the town never really caught on with British royals (Prince Charles promised to come but never has), the early upper-class toffs who careered down St Moritz’s streets never gave way to the rowdy après ski crowd.
“We’ve managed to avoid the binge drinking. Maybe it’s just too expensive to get drunk in St Moritz, but we do know how to have a good time,” says Susi Wiprächtiger, a mountain guide and ski and swimming instructor in St Moritz.
Locals such as Ariane Ehrat, a former Swiss ski champion and head of St Moritz’s tourist board, say: “There is a perception that St Moritz is snobbish but this is not the reality. It is authentic.”
Its discreet, understated charm, however, comes at a price. The strong Swiss franc has made the resort even more expensive at a time when the well-off, as opposed to the fabulously rich, want more value than glamour for their money. St Moritz also suffers from the second-home syndrome that has blighted many other fashionable towns and cities.
Wiprächtiger points out steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal’s home overlooking the town, homes owned by the Heineken family, and property belonging to other unnamed wealthy families. About half the resort’s properties are second residences, and in the past decade several hotels have been transformed into luxury apartments, some of them by Norman Foster. Today, the conundrum for St Moritz, which featured in Hitchcock’s 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much, at least two Bond films and Private Lives by Noël Coward, is how to encourage more tourism but not mass tourism. The resort wants to have its traditionalEngadiner Nusstorte (a nut cake) and eat it.
The old and the new rub shoulders in St Moritz. Wooden chalets and traditional Alpine homes mix with gleaming modern condominiums costing CHF 100,000 a week; celebrities share slopes with youngsters who speak Romansh – the least-spoken of Switzerland’s four official languages – until they go to school to be taught high German, Swiss German, English and Italian.
Retired teacher Edith Grob, 84, from near Basel, has spent her holidays in St Moritz for 38 years – three weeks in winter, four in summer – and swears by the local mineral baths and spas. She says St Moritz has to remember its roots. “You can walk around and discover so much wonderful nature and landscapes. Sometimes I feel I owe St Moritz part of my life.”
THE IMPACT ST MORITZ FOR TOURIST
Glamour meets nature means these days St. Moritz has become an important hub for winter sport enthusiasts. In fact, some 70 percent of the guests now come in winter. The 5000-strong town at 1800 meters (5,900 feet) above sea level, is popular due to reliable snow levels as well as varied skiing opportunities for all levels.
Surviving the future where want to become the most famous and most desirable holiday destination in the Alps.
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