The cool new mountain hotels making the Swiss Alps a stylish destination

The bedrooms are where the new really kicks in: 90 in total and redesigned from scratch, in part to provide a uniformity across both buildings, in part to introduce a retro 1970s look (how the wheel of fashion turns), defined by the olive greens and toffee browns of locally sourced stone and wood. Most striking of all is the new spa, brutalist in its angular, raw-stone simplicity, which must have had Wengen's old guard reaching for their schnapps.

The Eiger and Mönch mountains of the Bernese Alps, as seen from Mürren.

Robert Rieger

The Grand Hotel Belvedere is a five-star property, Wengen's first in fact, and with that comes a certain sense of propriety. On the opposite side of Lauterbrunnen valley, in the mountain village of Mürren, the French/Moroccan creative polymath Ramdane Touhami does not give a fig about stars. He opened Drei Berge Hotel in December 2023 in the former Hotel Bellevue. He, too, has followed a 1970s aesthetic, packing the place with personality and passion, pushing the boundary of Swiss tradition to its limit, and introducing a distinctly Wes Anderson vibe with the forest green exterior and candy-cane-striped shutters. His crowd is a younger, less affluent and more fashion-conscious one, hence his latest collaboration with his close friends Aaron Aujla and Emily Adams Bode Auila, the duo behind New York fashion brand Bode.

Candy-stripe shutters enliven the dark green façade of Drei Berge.

Robert Rieger

Between them, they have designed two brand new suites at Drei Berge named after champion horses, each one with the walls and ceiling entirely clad in wood, yet with the same pops of zing and zest as in the rest of the 19-room hotel. 'We are in the business of innovation,' says Ramdane of his hotel. 'It's the only place I can express myself from A to Z, to do things totally my way.'

Perhaps the same could be said of English artist and interior designer Luke Edward Hall, whose recent partnership with the Peruvian chef Claudia Canessa has seen the launch of Amaru, one of three restaurants in St Moritz's Kulm Hotel. 'I wanted to keep a tangible connection between the landscape, the cooking and the interior,' Luke says of the dining room that displays his favourite palette of greens, yellows and pinks. His handling of the Swiss aesthetic is playful rather than challenging, with hand-woven carpets designed to look like deer hide and a vaulted ceiling that is painted with local flowers of the Engadin.

Experimental Chalet, Verbier

MR.TRIPPER

Amaru aside, the trend for new and reimagined hotels in the Swiss Alps seems distinctly retrospective - a conscious drawing on 20th-century inspiration to guide the colours, textures and raw materials of traditional mountain style awav from cliché. Certainly, Italian designer Fabrizio Casiraghi, who has turned his hand to new hotel Experimental Chalet in Verbier, takes the combination of dark green lacquered wood and snow-white paint as the design staple in each of the 39 rooms, against which he has set the art deco-style furniture and fittings.

The Brecon's comfortably stylish seating area has a Simona Frigerio painting hanging above a sofa covered in a bespoke Zimmer + Rode fabric.

Robert Rieger

Taking the prize, however, is a small new hotel in the mountain village of Adelboden. Grant Maunder, co-owner of The Brecon, describes it as 'the ultimate private chalet with hotel standards' and hopes that guests might take it over for private parties as well as booking it room by room. Lotti Lorenzetti of Nicemakers interiors studio, who cut her hotel-design teeth with both Martin Brudnizki and Soho House, has worked with Grant to create a high-end version of someone's home where there are no TVs or minibars in the bedrooms and no children are allowed.

This is a hotel that feels deeply comfortable, where Grant's Welsh roots combine neatly with Switzerland - 'Swelsh' he calls it - and where the 22 rooms and the public spaces blend chunky fabrics with vintage finds and bespoke pieces, again in that fashionable mid-century style. No clichés here, just an earthy connectedness to the blockbuster view from every window - not, mind you, of the three great peaks, but still from the same Swiss picture book.

Rooms at Grand Hotel Belvedere cost from £391, B&B (beaumier.com); at Drei Berge Hotel from £355, B&B (dreibergehotel.ch); at the Experimental Chalet from £400, B&B (experimentalchalet.com); and at The Brecon from £670, all inclusive (thebrecon.com). Swiss (swiss.com) has flights from UK airports to Zurich and Genera. Travel Switzerland (travelswitzerland.com) offers unlimited access to the rail, bus and boat network, plus local trams and buses: it also includes the Swiss Museum Pass, which grants free entry to more than 500 establishments. Prices start at £229 for a three-day, second-class ticket. For more information, visit switzerland.com.