The luxury Swiss hotel where you can ski from the roof straight to the slopes
Rooftop bars, rooftop swimming pools and rooftop gardens – the tops of buildings are often used by architects to add a lofty twist to our favourite summer activities. It now seems winter wants a piece of the rooftop action too, as top-floor ski slopes become increasingly popular.
Plans have been revealed for a new luxury Swiss ski hotel that has a ski run from its roof, offering a cunning twist on ski-in/ski-out convenience.
Guests staying at the newly designed Hôtel des Horlogers, located in the lesser-known ski resort of Le Brassus in the canton of Vaud, will be able to ski straight down the slope to the hotel’s door and the slopes and street below thanks to a innovative zig-zag designed roof down the side of the building.
The hotel is being built by Danish architect firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) on behalf of Audemars Piguet, a Swiss watch brand, which was founded in the village in 1875.
The luxury brand is also building its own watch museum, the Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, next to the hotel – the rooftop slope will guide skiers straight to its entrance.
Hôtel des Horlogers has been designed to mimic the surrounding slopes, with five roof slabs that connect in a zig-zag pattern, and as well as leading down to the new Audemars Piguet museum accesses the local pistes below.
Le Brassus is one of four small resorts in the Vallée de Joux-Vaulion ski area in the Jura mountains, which have 42km of slopes in total. The area is in the west of Switzerland, an hour’s drive from Geneva airpor, and other resorts in the valley include equally unheard of L’Abbaye and L’Orient.
Once complete the hotel will cover 75,000 square feet and have 50 bedrooms, two restaurants, a bar, spa and conference centre, all of which will face out onto the slopes and the surrounding mountains.
Computer-generated images of the design show that the roof will be covered in grass in the summer after the snow melts.
Those behind the project have revealed the hotel is already under construction and the aim is to be open to the public in 2020.
It’s not the first time architects at BIG have designed a skiable roof. The company was behind the design of one of the longest artificial ski slopes in the world, opened on the roof of a state-of-the-art green power plant in Copenhagen, Denmark, last year.
The Koutalaki Ski Village development, in the resort of Levi in Finnish Lapland, also bends the rules of ski-in/ski-out convenience. Guests can take a lift up to the roof of their accommodation and ski back down and straight onto the slopes.
A ground-breaking idea that's gaining momentum, or just another architectural phase, however you look at it this new concept it certainly beats piling onto a packed ski bus or marching through town to get to the slopes each morning.
