Gstaad: The Last Resort TRAVEL BY PHOEBE EATON OCTOBER 31, 2014 9:00 AMOctober 31, 2014 9:00 am The wealthy residents of Gstaad, one of Europe’s few remaining bastions of Old World refinement, are waging a war against newly minted billionaires determined to turn the idyllic mountain town into their own gaudy playground. But despite putting up a solid front, the locals are quaking in their fur-lined ski boots. Photo Ivory Tower The Grand Hotel Alpina, photographed by Slim Aarons in 1977, was demolished in 1995 and later rebuilt as a five-star property. Ivory Tower The Grand Hotel Alpina, photographed by Slim Aarons in 1977, was demolished in 1995 and later rebuilt as a five-star property.Credit Slim Aarons/Hulton Archive/Getty Images The resort town of Gstaad likes to congratulate itself on its snow-globe-preserved Alpine charms. Here, change moves at a glacial pace. This has proved both boon and bane to this Galt’s Gulch of billionaires, where from the road, every chalet looks pretty much the same, and they talk about Russians the way people used to talk about Jews in Darien, Conn. If locals ever wandered too far off-piste with the big decisions, Gstaad would risk tumbling into the same precipice as, well, St. Moritz, the girl next door who just couldn’t say no and is now coping with noisy nightclubs and condominiums. And Russians. Anyone who lives in Gstaad also toyed with buying in St. Moritz, hence the rivalry between them; when a United Nations study in 2007 revealed St. Moritz’s wastewater contained traces of cocaine, the local magazine GstaadLife immediately proclaimed, “St. Moritz is the drug capital of the Alps.” If you are even considering Gstaad as a destination, chances are you don’t need the pronunciation key (that’s Gstaad, with a K). Perhaps you don’t even ski, in which case you are among the estimated 40 percent for whom Gstaad is solely about scene as scenery. And you are obviously not in college, or you’d be leaning toward Verbier or Val d’Isère. Gstaad is the place for people who have graduated to the big-big bucks — and their children with commensurate trust funds, many of whom are enrolled at Le Rosey, whose satellite winter campus is here. (The most expensive private school in the world, at about $110,000 a year, famously keeps students motivated by breaking midday for an afternoon schuss.) Photo Lap of Luxury Clockwise from top left: the actor David Niven (standing) celebrating the holidays with his family at the Palace in 1969; the businessman Peter Notz on the slopes circa 1970; Princess Grace of Monaco with her children Prince Albert (front) and Princess Caroline in 1962; the real estate mogul Marcel Bach on his motorcycle in 2009; Notz’s son Thierry at the Eagle Ski Club in 1971; a helicopter lands above Gstaad, captured in 1961 by Slim Aarons. Lap of Luxury Clockwise from top left: the actor David Niven (standing) celebrating the holidays with his family at the Palace in 1969; the businessman Peter Notz on the slopes circa 1970; Princess Grace of Monaco with her children Prince Albert (front) and Princess Caroline in 1962; the real estate mogul Marcel Bach on his motorcycle in 2009; Notz’s son Thierry at the Eagle Ski Club in 1971; a helicopter lands above Gstaad, captured in 1961 by Slim Aarons.Credit Clockwise from top left: Daily Mail/Rex/Alamy; Peter Notz; Slim Aarons/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Popperfoto/Getty Images; Mary Russell/Vogue/Condé Nast; Serge Hoeltschi/13 Photo. Twenty years ago, the German art collector Friedrich Christian “Mick” Flick picked Gstaad over St. Moritz as his primary residence for the quiet. “St. Moritz is dramatic. This is soft, charming. The dinners are more private. The chalets, more expensive,” he says in a surprising basso profundo. “Gstaad doesn’t really act like the rest of Switzerland. It’s unique, like an independent principality of Gstaad,” explains Cedric Notz, the 40-year-old son of Peter Notz, one of a trio of Euro playboys invariably described as “founders of the town” — the other two being Gunter Sachs, who killed himself here in 2011, and Flick, who misses the open house his great friend Peter kept for a decade. Notz and I are at the century-old Palace hotel, which appears to supervise the town from atop a hill as if it were its feudal estate. They say if you haven’t been to the Palace lobby, you haven’t really been to Gstaad, and as is custom, everybody here is rubbernecking everybody else. Notz has been invited to one of the diamond dinner galas, which are quite the thing around here, this one hosted by the luxury jeweler de Grisogono. Its founder, Fawaz Gruosi, who has the hooded eyes of a silent-film lothario, made his reputation convincing the world it needed black diamonds. He is also going through a very talked-about divorce from Chopard’s co-president Caroline Scheufele, another Gstaad long-timer who throws her own diamond dinners. It’s 1:30 in the morning when the house gypsy band comes on, striking up some Pink Martini on the cimbalom, the lobby still thick with bodies. People tend to wind up here after soirees at such fabulous chalets as Maurice Amon’s, where Peter Marino has created a phantasmagoric art-resplendent party room in the basement. A dance floor retracts over a swimming pool, just as it does at the enduring GreenGo nightclub in the Palace, where tradition dictates that during the last weekend of their final winter term, Le Rosey seniors cannonball into the pool fully clothed. A sign banning all manner of casual attire is posted outside the Palace’s revolving door in the evenings. When the hotel’s uncharacteristically young, low-key owner and general manager, Andrea Scherz, spotted new-to-town Harvey Weinstein in the Grill downstairs, tails out, undershirt visible, he initially thought “a waiter had gone crazy and was quitting.” Weinstein was asked to please rethink the outfit in his room upstairs. (Through a spokesperson, Weinstein says the incident didn’t happen.) Lorenz Bach sits in the restaurant at the Hotel Olden, now a plaything for its co-owner, the Formula One tycoon Bernie Ecclestone. The window of Bach’s store around the bend, Maison Lorenz Bach, targets the kind of Continental peacocks who parade around in tweedy waistcoats, just as he does. Bach, a member of one of Gstaad’s oldest farming families — his cow Bel Goldwyn Goldriana was a winner this year in Switzerland’s top bovine beauty pageant — admits to being the guy who enticed fashion’s biggest names to town. Seeing the potential returns, he says, they then opened storefronts along the Promenade, crowding out the characterful mom-and-pops. “When I came here after the war with my parents — and it was like this until the late ’70s — every shop on the main street was either a cheese shop or a butcher or a vegetable market,” laments the 78-year-old columnist Taki Theodoracopulos. Gstaad has been to Taki (as he’s known locally and professionally) what the Lake District was to Wordsworth. But recently, he’s considered forsaking Gstaad for Lauenen, the next village over: “It’s Gstaad in the 1950s. The Russians won’t come there because there are no boutiques.” It seems incredible that there was a time when Gstaad was an artists’ colony, when a room at the Palace cost around $10 a night. “There was Bill, of course, Buckley. Ken Galbraith. David Niven. Roger Moore. Nathan Milstein. Yehudi Menuhin,” says Taki. “I think it was Elizabeth Taylor who started the rot.” And now, Madonna’s here house-hunting. “Thank God you don’t see her in town,” he says. All those years with Niven and Moore and never a paparazzo. Sure, there was one photographer who used to hang around outside the private Eagle Ski Club, “and we asked him not to take pictures, and he never did,” says Taki. But good manners appear to have gone the way of the wooden ski. It being an overcast day at the Eagle atop the Wasserngrat ski lift nearby, Taki is eating a club sandwich down in the Palace lobby with the excitable investor Atilio Brillembourg and with Sebastian Taylor, another investor whose fortune was seeded at a backgammon table. Conversation flutters around the Eagle, now overrun by season guests. “Why can’t we be like the Corviglia, where only life members can have a table?” wonders Taki, referring to the legendary private club in St. Moritz. The English jeweler Laurence Graff had recently made the mistake of commandeering Taki’s special balcony perch at the Eagle. I said, ‘You’re gonna move or I’m gonna move you!’ ” he recalls. “Can you imagine? He said I came late.”(Graff declined comment.) Brillembourg mentions the Eagle has a much higher cap on life members than the Corviglia: “Why should this be? We’re a much smaller town.” Taki once wrote that the Eagle is built on top of a mountain because people have finished the social climb, but that the Corviglia was put in the middle of the mountain because people are still climbing. He adds that he has friends in St. Moritz with teenagers who “go out late at night and get beaten up by bodyguards whose Russian bosses have gone to bed.” Photo High Life Clockwise from top left: the Hotel Olden in 1961; the columnist Taki Theodoracopulos in 2007; the art collector Friedrich Christian Flick and the model Andrea de Portago on their wedding day in 1978; Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in front of their Gstaad chalet; a view of the imposing Palace hotel; Brigitte Bardot and her photographer husband Gunter Sachs walking their dog in 1967; the author William F. Buckley Jr. (left) with the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1977. High Life Clockwise from top left: the Hotel Olden in 1961; the columnist Taki Theodoracopulos in 2007; the art collector Friedrich Christian Flick and the model Andrea de Portago on their wedding day in 1978; Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in front of their Gstaad chalet; a view of the imposing Palace hotel; Brigitte Bardot and her photographer husband Gunter Sachs walking their dog in 1967; the author William F. Buckley Jr. (left) with the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1977.Credit Clockwise from top left: Bettmann/Corbis; Raphael Faux/GstaadPhotography; Interfoto/Alamy; Slim Aarons/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Slim Aarons/Getty Images; Bertrand Rieger/Hemis/Corbis; Keystone/Redux There isn’t a resident in Gstaad unaware of Taki’s special contempt for jewelers, Russians (but not Romanoffs), Bernie Ecclestone et filles, Arabs and any nonskier who would presume to snare a balcony table at his own beloved Eagle. Wearing his ski vest with its Eagle Club patch, Taki carries on like he’s the club’s own Scylla and Charybdis. “And it drives them crazy,” he says. “They can’t get in after spending $50 million on a chalet.” All around us are Le Rosey alumni visiting their children, parents who often decide to divert millions toward a chalet and stay a while. This is how Gstaad became Gstaad. One table over sits the preternaturally mature Christophe Gudin, 29, who was phased in last year as Le Rosey’s fifth director in 134 years. Gudin is supervising the school’s move to nearby Schönried, where he imagines they will break ground in three years once plans are approved. Three years is nothing around here: On the evening of April 11, 1995, the ramshackle Grand Hotel Alpina went down with a dynamite boom that resounded through the valley in more ways than one. There were ambitious plans for what would be the town’s first big-league hotel built from scratch in a century, and its Swiss developer would not be stopped by an injunction. The Alpina’s wealthy neighbors tied up the project in court for 13 years. The $325-million replacement popped out of the ground in time for Christmas two years ago. Gstaad, unique among Alpine villages, passed laws in the ’50s banning any departure from the classic three-story Simmentaler style. And the Alpina is no different. But what chalet owners do on the inside and underground is a separate matter, and with the Alpina now sparing no expense for art and a Japanese restaurant, other hotels feel obliged to keep up. The strangely relaxing Himalayan salt room spewing salubrious ions in Alpina’s underground spa is an able challenger to the Caracallan labyrinth down the hill at Le Grand Bellevue, which offers six different saunas and steam baths and an ice grotto. Locals nicknamed the Bellevue “the Bang & Olufsen” after some Philippe Starck-inflected radical surgery there in 2002. A new redo has rendered it a Swiss Family Soho House. Not that anyone expects any of these places to make money. Hotels don’t thrive where the high season consists of all of six weeks (though people are now coming here in August, exhausted after St. Tropez and Ibiza — but not so exhausted they can’t use a polo field). However good the Alpina and any other newcomers prove at being hotels, they are calculated real-estate plays, more about apartments and chalets for sale elsewhere on the grounds. The epic delay at the Alpina turned out to be a stroke of luck for Marcel Bach, the public face of the project and a persevering man. (After a first failed frostbitten crack at Mount Everest, he bestrode its summit a year later.) Property prices in the area are up, up and away. When the project was completed, Bach had Cristal delivered to the Alpina plaintiffs as a thank you. Gstaad’s first bona fide Russian oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovlev, bought two of the chalets, paying a reported $130 million apiece. This is the same Dmitry Rybolovlev penthoused in New York City’s 15 Central Park West, a fertilizer magnate whom Taki calls the king of — well, use your imagination. “And now he’s built a chalet here with very thick bulletproof glass,” he says, adding that he shares a builder with “Reebo.” People say Bach runs this town. The son of a local farmer, he decides whose calls get returned and who will play well with the Bertarelli, Fayed, Flick and Goulandris families. I turn up at the Alpina, expecting to meet him in an ascot, drunk on the glühwein of power. Bach, who is the cousin of the comparatively dandified Lorenz Bach, disappoints with a simple ruddy-faced geniality as he relates the saga of this controversially euthanized hotel and its flashy resurrection. The Alpina is just a one-minute drive from its arch-competitor, the Palace — practically across the street. “Ve are a bit higher,” says Bach, checking his fingernails and grinning. “Important point.” Another important point: Bach is now very, very rich. Despite Gstaad’s billionaire tax exiles and their fortunes, most of the area’s farming families, whose land the rich have been gnawing over the years, haven’t fared nearly as well. “Which good-hearted millionaire would grant us a generous donation,” asked an ad in the local newspaper Anzeiger von Saanen, “so that we do not have to give up our farm?” The majority investor in the Alpina is the Senegal sugar baron Jean-Claude Mimran, a Morocco-born Jew (something people around town tend to mention) and onetime co-owner of Lamborghini, some of whose children have attended Le Rosey. Unsurprisingly, the dealer Larry Gagosian has been seen sharking around the Alpina, hangout to Mimran’s handsome 26-year-old son, Nachson, who controls the hotel’s revolving art collection. Winning the favor of Bach is essential to anyone who wants to do business here: Bach mentions the powerful Swiss People’s Party, popular with Gstaad’s farmers and famous for getting minarets banned and a shockingly xenophobic poster showing black and brown hands grabbing at a pile of Swiss passports. Building projects still require a sign-off from the commune via big town meetings where “everybody goes and rises [sic] the hand,” says Bach. The commune has another pressing concern: global warming. Gstaad is at a lower elevation than other “snow secure” resorts higher in the clouds, not that enough people ski here anyway. The Eagle had to acquire a majority stake in the nearby lift when its operator went out of business. To protect their own copious investment in the town, Bach teamed up with Ecclestone and Mimran to buy the rights to the glacier ski area next door, nattily rebranded Glacier 3000. It can be an irascible peak prone to gusting winds and sudden ice showers, but is skiable November through early May. Serious downhillers adore it. Some moguls commute by helicopter to the top, where they can see the Matterhorn and all the way to France and Italy. “It changes your heart, this view,” says Paul and Linda McCartney’s former ski instructor Thomas Ischer. Bach is not the only local who sees Gstaad as a place that needs saving; the 12,000 people who live in the area require a year-round economy, and they’re betting on Les Arts Gstaad, a new $110 million vividly modern concert hall and exhibition space to boost it. Rybolovlev is a supporter, his help conditional on the hall having excellent acoustics. Naturally, Taki is against the hall, preferring an old tent he insists has worked all these years for the town’s annual Menuhin music festival. Taki has taken to blaming two widows who have supported the Arts Gstaad project, Baroness Marion Lambert and Dame Theresa Sackler. These women (whom he considers friends) have too much time on their hands, he jokes, “and instead of spreading their money to poor Greek sailors out of work and buying gigolos, which is what ladies used to do, they want to go cultural on us. Go artsy-fartsy on us.” Robert S. Stewart is a mysterious self-styled visionary who has been running around town waving a 80-plus-page Master Plan to anyone who will listen, proposing to save the region with Davos-like conferences, amongst other tactics. The Manhattan-based curator Neville Wakefield and his well-connected artist girlfriend, Olympia Scarry, were behind this year’s “Elevation 1049,” an avant-garde art exhibition taking place all over town that pulled (and occasionally bewildered) an international audience. At times it felt curated by Antonioni, what with a house that was sent downhill on skis just once — a “kinetic sculpture” by Roman Signer. The deep-pocketed arts patron Maja Hoffmann, who helped fund “Elevation” and is lately a permanent resident, considers the show a success (even if she has dropped off the board of Les Arts Gstaad, waiting to see what happens). There are many blue-chip collections in this town, which makes it tantalizing to artists seeking buyers. “We can start a conversation in this valley and put this town on the map in terms of the international art world,” Hoffmann says as she stalks in her Russian felt boots through Apple Pie Square, where young people are opening pop-up fashion stores and art galleries. Earlier in Lauenen, showing off Thomas Hirschhorn’s igloo village, she noted the sad shape of the ice sculptures. It had been a warm February. She pointed to the bald brown patches on the surrounding hills: globale Erwärmung. Global warming. “The season is getting shorter and shorter,” said Hoffmann. “The rich are more busy, and they are less and less in Gstaad. ‘Look at your Rolex. The time of revolt has come,’” she said, translating one sign. “Art has always been a way to activate other things,” she said, walking on. ikh-luxuryrental
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