Once we knew what to expect from ski resorts. Cosy wood-panelled mountain cafés with a roaring fire, perhaps some early-1900s ski poles on the walls, a flourish of red gingham and, to really jazz things up, a stuffed marmot or mountain goat’s head. They were just what you wanted when you came in from the snow — a traditional, old-fashioned, warm hug of an environment.
But then something changed. Ski resorts started getting trendy. People began drinking, not gluhwein, but cocktails. In bars. Stylish bars. The kind you’d get in London. Where once there were chocolate-box chalets, designers plonked swish hotel blocks in chrome, neon and slate.
Pistes may have been pimped all over the place, but one resort that has gone mad with the makeover is Laax, in a beautiful spot in the Graubünden region of Switzerland above the Rhône gorge, surrounded by crags and vast pine forests. But its natural environment is no longer the only source of aesthetic appeal — there are hip bars, cafés and hotels from crest to valley floor.
Last winter I was amazed to find almost every mountain café peddling tasteful interior design alongside the hot chocolates and Jägermeisters. Station Plaun, a former lift station on the Plaun mountain, is a capsule of sheepskins, gold wall-mounted reindeer heads, dangling balls made from Astroturf and a glass-fronted fire set into a matt-black wall. Outside was La Vacca, a restaurant in a tepee. And there’s the Café No Name, a scruffily cool mountain hut with a DJ, good soups and snacks and healthy-looking but heavily pierced staff, just above the fun park on the Crap Sogn Gion.
This park, with its dozens of massive kickers, rails, pipes, smaller jumps and its own lifts, has made Laax a huge draw for the freestyle ski and snowboard brigade (I’ve never seen a resort so heavily populated by young riders in such luminous clothing) and has led Laax to host several major snowsports events, including the Burton European Open Snowboarding Championships and the Brits ski and snowboard annual championships and music festival.
It was for the 2008 Brits that I first visited Laax, staying in the resort’s most famously hip pad — Riders’ Palace, a boutique hostel aimed at snowboarders — which has a sleek bar, DJs and a live-music venue. It was there, as well as in the fun slopeside Crap bar (named after the ski mountain) that outrageous nightly parties ensued during the Brits.
Returning to Laax last season for a more sedate jaunt, I found many of the shops and bars at the foot of the slopes had gone; in their place was a vast site of redevelopment, the Rocks Resort. This flash complex of 160 apartments, bars (including a new Crap), ski shops and eight restaurants is nearing completion (its central piazza opens on December 19), though the apartments are already available for holiday rentals, as well as to buy.
Laax is an unusual resort in that it is almost entirely owned by one company, the Weisse Arena Gruppe, including most of the mountain bars, resort shops and major hotels, as well as adjoining resorts Falera and Flims, so it was easy to push through a grand-scale development that entailed knocking down several popular establishments.
The Rocks is an amazing work of architecture, almost megalithic, with eight slate-clad cubic buildings. The use of local materials is a major feature of the project and the slate comes from boulders that were strewn through the region by a colossal landslide 10 000 years ago — supposedly the biggest in history — which shaped the valley in which Laax sits. So, although the new development is big and imposing, it’s in harmony with the landscape.
Inside the minimalist apartments local Valser quartzite stone is used for the kitchen tops, walls and wet-rooms (the whole bathroom turns into a steam room and the baths are deep stone troughs) and an open-plan living area has designer lighting, concrete and limestone, underfloor heating and grey sofas, and the bedrooms (two or four) have storage cleverly hidden in untreated gnarled-oak walls. It felt wrong to skid around there in wet ski socks or hang thermals out to dry. One of the best features are the massive windows, which glow blue from the outside, looking out over the lower reaches of the home run.
I spent a few days at the adjacent Hotel Signina, which pre-existed the development but has been revamped to be incorporated into the Rocks, with apartment guests going there to eat, swim and sauna. Full of animal prints and furs, rock sculptures and giant candles, it proved modern can be cosy and the restaurant, with funky zebra-print chairs and quirky menu, was a welcome change from melted cheese and rostis. I had scallops in a pomegranate vinaigrette and glazed chicken with guacamole potatoes — very good, though I heard the next table complain about the small portions, to which the waiter responded: “It’s the fashion.”
Laax is a compact resort, with just a few restaurants, bars and clubs, but one night I headed into Flims, a 10-minute drive or bus ride away — or a few runs across the mountain by day. Who would have known Switzerland was so hip? Boutiques such as Alprausch, selling fashionable snow clothes and labels you can’t get in Britain, and cool bars, such as the Livingruhm, which had palm trees in pots, white faux-leather booths and a glass floor looking down into a fashion store below.
With all the kids in rave-glow colours, the festivals and the trendy hangouts, Laax and Flims are at risk of becoming Shoreditch-on-Snow, but the Rocks adds sophistication, and there is plenty for families too: there’s a new Snow Wonderland for children beside the Rocks and long, gentle, tree-lined pistes that are ideal for learners. Brilliantly for free-riders and adventurous skiers, the shiny rainbow dudes tend to stick to the park, meaning the off-piste tree runs and gullies are surprisingly uncrowded. Even on clear days at the Brits, when the place was over-run by snowboarders, I found stacks of untracked powder.
Style, snow, great nightlife — not a bad resort, unless you still long to wear your reindeer sweater and have a fondue in a chintzy chalet. — © Guardian News & Media 2009
For more information go to www.laax.com and www.flims.com