A Tale Of Two Ski Resorts

Set in a crown of peaks, Verbier was cow pasture until the Sixties when a crowd of ski bums showed up, many of whom stayed around to create Verbier – and its laid-back atmosphere – as it is now. It has fun in its bones. A feeling that can still be felt in Verbier’s famed après-ski scene, which, as offered at Le Rouge, Farinet and The Farm Club, is expensive but unpretentious. It is telling that this month the hospitality group Experimental Cocktail Club, encompassing hotels in London and Paris and a beach bar in Ibiza, have chosen to open their Experimental Chalet in Verbier. Mid-century-styled interiors by Fabrizio Casiraghi are refreshingly un-chalet, with velvet curtains, pink rugs and fringed cocktail chairs in bedrooms and a darkly inviting ground floor bar. Experimental Chalet will also take over the running of The Farm Club, Verbier’s most established nightclub, where the bar prices are as steep as the combined ages of its patrons.

Les Carroz, by contrast, is a small Haute Savoie village in the French Alps, occupying a wide, sunny shelf, high enough to reliably get snow from November onwards. Though in 1939 it was the site of the country’s first ever ski lift, it is not in the least famous or fashionable: Grace Kelly never skied in Les Carroz nor has Prince Harry been known to trouble its après-ski. It’s a family spot, pretty but not too pretty, and very French, a gem in its ordinary typicality. There’s a village square and a handful of decent restaurants, a few good places to get a noisette, or a pizza, or a salad heavy with lardons, but nothing remarkable. There’s a butcher a patisserie and the boulangerie where my husband and I like to get croissants, six at a time, the butter staining the paper bag and the confectionery shops where we buy chocolate bars to stuff into our ski jacket pockets to share on the lift up the mountain. In December there are Christmas trees lined up outside the supermarket next to the boxes of tangerines and walnuts and the rotisserie chickens going around in a glass oven. Once a week there’s a farmer’s market in the main car park, where country folk with thick mountain accents sell saucisson and cheese and bread. There’s a lively, ski-in, ski-out place to stay – the Milk Hotel – and apres ski is the pub: the Pointe Noir or Le Marlow, both of which are full of red-cheeked faces in ski gear shouting over the music while French teenagers smoke outside.
 

Les Carroz’s specialness is its unspecialness. You can’t buy Chanel or Moncler here. No one cares what you look like on the slope, there’s no social hierarchy, no shouldering to the front of the VIP queue, nothing in the way of glamour – except for the peace and the mountains themselves, of course, beneath which the village huddles on its shelf, all twinkling lights and deep snow.
 
My father-in-law likes to think he ‘made’ Les Carroz. He sold the virtues of the village with such enthusiasm to friends from his South Devon town that a number of them have bought up apartments in the pretty, chalet-style complexes around the skating rink. Despite his claims, the village still feels resolutely French, and specifically Savoyard – a region, fiercely protective of its cultural history that only became part of France in the 19th Century – with an understated cuisine to match. The place to try it is Les Servages d’Armelle, a beautifully outfitted rustic hotel, probably the smartest in the Grand Massif area (wood panelled bedrooms are furnished with log burners). Its restaurant – not cheap, but worth it – for fondue, raclette or tartiflette is where to go for special occasion meals, birthdays, Christmas, New Year.