They look like giant grey sugar cubes. They're halfway up a mountain in the
middle of Switzerland. And they're about to put the pretty, little-known
resort of Laax on the winter sports map.
Over the past 30 years, innovative design at ski resorts has come mainly from
across the Atlantic. The “high-tech mountain village” style of contemporary
apartments - large rooms with all the mod cons, hot tubs, sun-deck balconies
and ski-inski-out facilities - took off in the US and Canada in the 1980s,
blazing a trail across North America's mountains.
The Alps lagged hopelessly behind, as many resort owners were content to
retain tired old buildings that they knew would fill out season after
season. Why bother blowing cash on something new?
Now the sugar cubes of Laax could be about to change all that. I met Reto
Gurtner, the extrovert president of Rocksresort, at the site that he hopes
will start a European fight-back against North America's slick resorts. Two
of the planned 11 cubes have recently opened, with the rest to be rolled out
by 2011.
“Skiing has not grown in Europe the way that it has in North America over the
past 15 years,” Gurtner says, stroking his goatee and gazing out from
beneath a floppy flat cap. The reason, he argues, has been the fragmented
ownership of cable cars, hotels and ski-hire shops in European resorts.
The resulting lack of cohesion has caused misery to millions of skiers. “For a
long time it's been too complicated,” he says, as he swipes a card on a
security pass to enter one of the cubes. “For the first day after check-in
everything is boring: you have to go to the hire shop and go to get ski
passes. Boring. For mothers on family holidays, it's a pain.”
At Rocksresort things are different. Skiers can buy lift passes, hire skis,
purchase equipment at shops, and pay for meals at mountain restaurants using
the swipe card that opens their apartment.
At the start of trips, holidaymakers drive into a vast car park that spreads
out beneath each of the buildings. They then walk to a check-in desk, where
they are given ski passes and sent to an adjoining fitting room to pick up
skis and boots.
After this process, which takes about 20 minutes, they simply drop their skis
in warmed lockers, and take a lift up to their swanky apartments. All the
usual first-day ski fuss is over ... quickly. “There is not another resort
in the Alps that can offer this,” says Gurtner, who hired consultants from
Whistler in Canada to bring in the necessary technology.
But it is the striking look of the immense buildings that is catching people's
attention, with Design Hotels, the über-cool (and über-fussy) hotel group,
already signing up Rocksresort to its stable of architecturally cutting-edge
properties. “With clean lines and consciously minimalist exteriors finished
in rough-hewn stone,” a spokesman says, “this hotel succeeds at blending in
with its environment, while standing as a bold design statement.”
The Cubist look was inspired by the history of the region, which had the
“biggest landslide of all time” 10,000 years ago when rocks tumbled from
nearby mountains. “We originally wanted to call the resort the Rolling
Stones, but we thought a certain rock group might object.”
Each cube is covered in quartzite from a local quarry (4,000 tonnes will be
used) and is dotted with large, irregularly shaped mirror-glass windows. The
apartments are sumptuously decorated, with bedrooms made to look like wooden
mountain cabins, Italian sofas, bathrooms that convert into steam rooms, and
slick kitchen units.
