Badrutt's Palace
St. Moritz, Switzerland
The turreted castle that invented the winter holiday.
Johannes Badrutt is the man who, so the story goes, bet a group of English summer guests in 1864 that St Moritz was even lovelier under snow, and offered to cover their travel if he was wrong. He won. In the process he more or less invented alpine winter tourism, and his family's Palace has presided over it ever since.
The hotel is unapologetically grand: a stone tower, wood-panelled halls, and that extraordinary Engadine light pouring off the frozen lake. There's a formality here that has mostly vanished elsewhere, and in this setting it feels not stuffy but right.
The Verdict
This is the mountain holiday at its most storied. Come for the skiing. Stay for the sense that you've stepped into a world that decided, sometime around 1910, that it was perfect exactly as it was.
Skiing back to the door as the alpenglow turns the Engadine peaks rose-pink, then thawing out by the fire in the Renaissance Bar with a glass of something Swiss and expensive.
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