Hôtel Le Central
Evolène, Switzerland
Even more so than Zermatt, on the other side of the 4,357-metre Dent Blanche, Evolène has clung to its traditions with a crampon grip. At the heart of Switzerland’s pristine Val d’Hérens, the tiny village of stone and larch is known for its singular patois and festivals involving fighting cows and wooden animal masks.
The seven-room Hôtel Le Central, in a renovated inn opposite the church, is a homely but luxurious place, full of tactile wood and with cool Baabuk wool slippers for padding to the grotto-like basement spa.
It’s the opening salvo in Le Rucher D’Evolène (the apiary) — essentially a village-wide heritage restoration project, funded by motor oil magnates and longtime visitors the Zaugg family, and overseen by Belgian CEO Steven Jacob, an alumnus of French hotel group Zannier. Le Rucher already includes three standalone chalets, including conversions of 16th-century grain stores built in the local blockbau style, and will eventually include more chalets, hotel rooms, a restaurant and a cultural centre — all in a series of spaces restored using stringently traditional local techniques.
Doubles from about £540 (all prices are per night); rucher.com
Le Graal
Cortina, Italy
The Winter Olympics might be over but the facelift continues in ritzy Cortina d’Ampezzo. The biggest news might be the long-delayed opening of the Mandarin Oriental Cristallo — the brand’s first alpine hotel — in an iconic 1901 spa resort reimagined by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. Announced in 2022 and originally due to open in time for the Games in February 2026, the launch is now slated for the rather vague-sounding “early 2027”. Le Graal, due to open in December, might be a safer bet. Housed in a 1920s palazzo that was previously the Hotel Italia, the 30-room property will now form part of a new hospitality group including a Rome members club and a Lake Como hotel. The interiors are by the Rome-based furniture designer Achille Salvagni, who wanted to subvert alpine clichés, with Renaissance paintings, whimsical reliefs and furniture inspired by Roman modernism. There’s also an American-style cocktail bar and a restaurant overseen by feted Sicilian chef Giovanni Guarneri.
Doubles from about £660; legraal.com
Trailborn
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
The 1970s-built Snow King Resort was one of Jackson Hole’s most recognisable meeting points — so its rebranding under Marriott’s outdoors-forward Trailborn brand feels like a significant move for one of America’s most hard-skiing resorts. The bones of the 203-room ski-in-ski-out hotel haven’t changed much, but it’s been given a soft, ’70s-accented redesign by Portland-based design firm Vida. There’s a playful hedonism to it all: photo booths and cruiser bikes; duckpin bowling in the Alley-Oop sports bar and oil portraits of grizzled mountain men at the comfort food-y Old Timer bar. The Adventure Planning Desk specialises in trips to the Grand Teton or Yellowstone National Parks, as well as providing guides to Jackson Hole’s legendary backcountry routes.
Doubles from about £120; trailborn.com
Bârma
La Tania, France
Built to house journalists and athletes for the 1992 Winter Olympics, car-free La Tania has become a budget- and family-friendly alternative to Courchevel, in the same ski area just to the east. Bârma (a regional dialect word for “rock shelter”) significantly raises the bar. La Tania’s first four-star, it will have 75 rooms, a Savoyard restaurant and a grotto-inspired spa with products by alpine skincare doyenne Susanne Kaufmann. Interiors, by Rémi Giffon of chalet specialist Atelier Giffon, tread a safe but happy path of soft neutrals, curves and fabrics, with archways and light fittings that nod to the mountains. Part of La French Collection, a new hotel portfolio from nationwide real estate developers Groupe Giboire, it looks like a fairly straight-up crowd-pleaser, from the kids’ room with a ball pit to a ski shop in partnership with the smart L’Atelier Courchevel.
Doubles from about £335; barmahotelcourchevel.com
Hôtel L’Uciole
Crans-Montana, Switzerland
There’s been a sense of momentum in sunny Crans-Montana since its divisive takeover by Vail Resorts a few years ago — and this looks set to be a banner season, with the World Ski Championships in February and a glut of new openings, including upcoming private residences by Fendi. The four-star Hôtel L’Uciole, due to launch in December, is the most noteworthy — a renovation of the chalet-style Hôtel Mirabeau, it was partly conceived by the Paris Society hospitality group (which runs Le Refuge de Solaise in Val d’Isère as well as iconic Paris addresses including Maxim’s). The 60 rooms will be defined by soft Art Deco-ish curves, with a speakeasy-style bar and an Italian restaurant.
Doubles from about £195; hotel-luciole.com
Noa
Schladming, Austria
A mining town turned ski resort, Schladming is best known as the venue for the World Cup night slalom, held every January on Planai course. That raucous event’s reputation as the biggest party on the circuit sometimes overshadows the resort’s other merits, including decent hotels and access to 222km of pistes. The 26-suite Noa opened in the summer, run by mother-daughter duo Veronika and Stephanie Walcher.
As with so many Austrian resorts, wellness is a focus, from a rooftop pool to a cryochamber and treatments including JetPeel facials using pressurised air. There’s also a “1,000-Star Starlight Suite” with a round bed and a glass ceiling for star gazing, though a bigger selling point, at least in January, might be its direct view over the Planai.
Doubles from about £204; noa-schladming.com
White Elephant
Aspen, Colorado
With its curved, metal-clad glass entrance that could mark a Louis Vuitton store, there’s an unapologetic luxury to the White Elephant Aspen — a third property from the brand owned by real estate billionaire Stephen Karp, after hotels in Nantucket and Palm Beach. Once the mid-priced Hotel Aspen on West Main Street, it now has the feel of a 54-room private home, with its cream-and-cognac palette, high thread counts, Miami-style pool terrace and Alex Katz landscape paintings. The Lola 41 restaurant concept is little changed from the other White Elephant hotels, with the same Yutaka barbecue eel and king crab sushi rolls, Lola burgers with foie gras and New York strip steaks with pecorino truffle fries.
Doubles from about £297; whiteelephantaspen.com
Bourbon Hotel
Courchevel, France
If the 1950s-built Hôtel des 3 Vallées in the heart of Courchevel 1850 was cool before, it’s due to go up a notch when it reopens in December as the 31-room Bourbon, under the Chapitre Six group known for Parisian hotels like the 60s-rock-themed Bus Palladium and the Japanese-influenced Hôtel Hana. With its dark wood panels and soft amber colour scheme, there’s a jazz club vibe to the hotel’s redesign by Studio Henry and art director Pierre Alexis-Guinet, both better known for working with fashion brands. Spaces are plushly understated, from the wood-panelled restaurant overseen by Italian chef Simone Zanoni, also executive chef at Paris’s Le George, to the marbled baths in the spa and the cocktail and vinyl bar.
Doubles from £1,043; bourbon-hotel.com
Saint Roch
Courchevel, France
The Bourbon isn’t the only Courchevel 1850 hotel to be given an expensive makeover in December. Maisons Pariente, the group behind Paris’s Le Grand Mazarin and Le Coucou in Meribel, are set to reopen the 37-room Saint Roch Courchevel, formerly a family-run four-star of the same name right on the Bellecôte piste. As with the Bourbon, no alpine clichés here: interior designers Virginie Friedmann and Delphine Versace (MoSuke, La Pérouse Nice) were partly inspired by dachas for the thick fabrics and textures throughout, and the palette of sepia and faded bordeaux, including the lobby with its stained-glass reception. Abstracts curated by Parisian gallerist Amélie du Chalard hang in the plush-carpeted restaurant, and there are Ottoman nods in the marbles and mosaics of the spa with pool.
Doubles from £1,490; saintrochcourchevel.com
Schiefergut
Flachau, Austria
Austria tends to do both family-owned and family-oriented hotels well — and Schiefergut, from a local farming family who already run a locavore restaurant and shop in Flachau, looks as wholesome as they come. Opening in December, with 28 mostly family-sized rooms and suites, children’s experiences will be central to it all, from a natural swimming pond to a barn filled with farm animals and hay for leaping about. There’s an adults-only section of the spa, but the main event is the indoor-outdoor infinity pool fed by a flume lit by flashing lights. More broadly, Flachau’s an underrated spot that’s just over an hour south of Salzburg, with good-value lift passes offering access to more than 200km of pistes.
Doubles from about £212, minimum three-night stay; schiefergut.at
Kai Zao
Zaō Onsen, Japan
Less than five hours by car or train from Tokyo, there aren’t many more evocative Japanese ski towns than Zaō Onsen, with its steaming, sulphur-infused onsen baths and juhyo “snow monsters” — fir trees frozen by Siberian winds to create an otherworldly backdrop to skiing, especially when lit up at night. Kai Zao, which opens in October, is a circular tower with 49 minimalist rooms and a “spiral wellness journey” which culminates in a rooftop hot bath inspired by the nearby Okama crater lake. Run by Hoshino Resorts, known for onsen-oriented properties across Japan, it’s more slickly corporate than the traditional ryokan inns Zaō Onsen is best known for — but local nods are central, from crimson-accented rooms inspired by the safflowers of the Yamagata prefecture to regional kaiseki set menus featuring duck and forest mushroom hotpots.
Doubles from about £145; hoshinoresorts.com
Fahrenheit 7
Les Menuires, France
The original Fahrenheit 7 hotel in Val Thorens has a committed following for its DJ sets and extra-large ski shop, and this December the brand is bringing a similar formula down the mountain to Les Menuires. The set-up at the 51-room hotel is little changed, from the retro-leaning design led by the brand’s co-founder Véronique Vidoni to the 200 sq m terrace, also DJ-ready and sponsored by Veuve Clicquot. With a Mediterranean-meets-Savoyard restaurant, 12-metre pool and 100 sq m ski rental shop, everything seems geared towards unfussy hedonism.
Doubles from about £290; fahrenheitseven.com
Garance
Morzine, France
Formerly the family-run Hotel Les Airelles, in a prime position opposite Morzine’s tourist office, the 65-key Garance opens in December as part of the Chamonix-based Mont-Blanc Collection. While retaining the hotel’s 1970s chalet-style shell, Paris’s Studio Briand & Berthereau — known for airy surf houses as much as chalets — has crisply redesigned with light woods and curves, with an indoor-outdoor spa, an alpine-locavore restaurant and a bar with a soundproofed karaoke booth.
Doubles from about £250; garancemorzine.com
The Observatory
Sun Valley, Idaho
Viceroy’s second hotel in the American mountains — after the Viceroy Snowmass — opens in October in Sun Valley, where the world’s first ski chairlift was built in 1936. In the heart of the old mining town of Ketchum, the new-build property is all about the rooftop observatory boasting a rotating dome and professional-grade PlaneWave telescope for celestial views of the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve. The 73 bedrooms are crisply neutral and there’s a 465 sq m spa, with hot and cold pools and treatments from breathwork sessions to compression boot therapy. The Joan restaurant, with a wood-fired oven, was inspired by philanthropic local horsewoman Joan Blank, while the Odin’s Corner café-bar is named after the hotel dog.
Doubles from about £650; viceroyhotelsandresorts.com
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