Off piste

Val d'Isere Experimental Chalet

GETAWAYS • French Alps

After living in France for more than 30 years, I’d pretty much given up on the country’s ski resorts. Yes, almost cloyingly pretty Megève has several excellent restaurants — Les Flocons du Sel serves up a brilliantly creative and rigorous modern rendering of Savoyard cooking — and the experience of visiting a favorite snow-dusted petting zoo of the French bourgeoisie has a certain fascination, but ultimately, it’s too stuffy, and the snow’s not great. Flashy Courchevel is a prime destination for studying designer ski togs, but the real sport there is spending money. And the logistics of skiing in Chamonix are just too mass-transit-style time-consuming.

Now, with the December opening of the 113-room Val d'Isere Experimental Chalet, I’ve finally found a place in the French Alps where I really want to go downhill. Following the same shrewd playbook they recently used on the Hotel Regina in Biarritz, the trend-setting Paris-based Experimental Group transformed the dowdy, in-need-of-renovations L’Aigles des Neiges into a bullseye of an address with the best bar in town (try a Green Fizz with Chartreuse génépi and celery bitters) and two great restaurants, one with a cheesy menu and the other with the kind of naughty, high-calorie comfort food you crave after a day on the slopes, including an epic omble chevalier, the king of Alpine fish, roasted with pine-tree-bud-seasoned beurre blanc.

The hotel also has a lap pool, sauna, steam room, and spa offering hot-stone massages and facials designed by German aesthetics pioneer Dr. Barbara Sturm.

What’s best of all about this hotel, however, is the interior design by Paris interior architect Dorothée Meilichzon. Working with wood, wooly fabrics, and rich Sultan’s harem colors, like ivory, lapis lazuli, ox blood, and spruce, she adeptly succeeded at transforming the traditional decor of French mountain chalets from fusty rustic to frisky urbane without losing a distinctively Alpine sense of place. It makes for a great place to shack up, even if you’re not here to ski. –Alexander Lobrano

→ Val d'Isere Experimental Chalet (Val-d'Isère) • 101 Rue de la Poste • Wknd nights from 378 € per • Book.