Gstaad

Why go

Luxury defined by restraint — a building code that keeps everything low, wooden and chalet-shaped. A car-free main street — the Promenade, closed to traffic, where the whole village conducts its business. Cross-country and walking — two hundred kilometres of winter trails, and the summer season locals prefer. Continuity — the same families have wintered here for four generations, which shapes the tone entirely.

The character

Gstaad is a village of about three thousand in the Saanenland, and its distinction is a series of refusals. There is no high-rise, because the building code forbids it. There are no lift-linked mega-domains of the French kind, because expansion was declined. The main street has been closed to cars since the 1970s. Where Courchevel and Verbier competed on vertical metres and nightlife, Gstaad competed on nothing at all — and thereby kept the thing its clientele actually wants, which is to be left alone in a place that looks like a Swiss village because it still is one.

The result is an unusual social physics. The Palace hotel sits on its hill above chalets belonging to people who could buy it, and the code of the valley is that nobody makes a display. Le Rosey, the boarding school, moves its entire campus here for the winter term, which explains a certain international undertone. The skiing is decent rather than heroic; the walking, the sledging and the long lunch are the real programme. Gstaad's proposition is that scarcity and quiet are the last luxuries, and it has been right about that for a century.

Places of character

The Promenade — car-free, chalet-fronted, and the place where the village's entire social life is transacted. Gstaad Palace — 1913 on its own rise, family-run for three generations, with a nightclub in the bunker beneath it. Saanen — the older village next door, with a fifteenth-century church and none of the glamour. Glacier 3000 — the Diablerets glacier and the Peak Walk suspension bridge, for the one big view. The Lauenensee — a lake in a protected valley twenty minutes away, best walked to in summer. A mountain restaurant on the Wispile — the long lunch, on a terrace, with cows below.

The way to do it

Come for the rhythm not the vertical: mornings outside, long lunches, early evenings. Do not overdress in daylight and do dress for dinner — the inversion is the local code. In winter take the cross-country trails as seriously as the pistes. In summer, when prices halve, the same valley becomes some of the best walking in Switzerland with almost nobody in it.

One perfect day

Breakfast slowly, then out on the Wispile chairlift for a morning of easy runs or the winter walking path along the ridge, with the Saanenland below and no queue anywhere. Long lunch on a sun terrace — rösti, a glass of Fendant, an hour longer than intended. Afternoon on the cross-country loops toward Lauenen while the light goes gold, or sledging down from Eggli with children who are not yours. Tea at the Palace at five, which is a ritual over a meal. Dinner in a chalet restaurant with a hundred-year-old ceiling, then a walk home down the closed Promenade in complete silence.

Grand hotels

Gstaad Palace — 1913, run by the Scherz family since 1938; the fairy-tale silhouette on the hill and the social centre of the valley. The Alpina Gstaad — the modern counterweight, opened 2012, built with reclaimed timber and the best spa in the Alps.

When to go

Best expression: February, full winter, school holidays and the Palace at its liveliest. Consider: July, for walking, cattle drives and half the prices. Avoid if possible: November and late April, when lifts close and much of the village shuts.

The frame

Ideal stay 4 nights · Minimum 2 nights · Best arrival the MOB panoramic train from Montreux · Airport GVA, 150 km · Walkability the village on foot · Best without a car yes