Words: Joseph Bullmore
The Kulm Hotel was the very first place in Switzerland to have electric lighting. It’s one of those so-what factoids that seems odder the more you look at it. The first place to have electric lights in Switzerland. Not Bern, Zurich or Geneva – but here, 1,822 metres up, in the lobby of a grand hotel in a remote mountain village that still takes a calendar day to travel to; that winding railway climb which grows slower and slower as it pulls higher and higher, until it rolls in, almost at a saunter, to St Moritz at the end of the line.
The Kulm must have looked otherworldly back then, like an alien ship that had taken a wrong turn at Alpha Centauri and descended on the valley to pull out its map – a humming, glowing entity above a cluster of candlelit huts and inns. What sorcery is this? What madness? It’s like Fitzcarraldo, that man who tried to drag a Victorian steamship across the hills of the Amazon to build a vast opera house in the remotest plains of the delta. This is the same, except it makes sense. And there’s fondue.The lights arrived in 1878, thanks to Thomas Badrutt, the hotelier and first son of the town (there have been plenty of others, but we’ll get to the playboys later), who also gives his name to the Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in the village.
The other major hotel is Suvretta House that, as you know, sits just outside the village all on its own, lounging at the end of a pine-flanked track at the foot of the Corviglia piste.
All three are very fine places in their own rights – a trio of genuine pillars of society with individual charms and back stories, like members of some Swiss hotel supergroup. And in the same way that some people always felt more inclined towards Paul or George over John, say, you find in time that certain guys are just Kulm guys; certain chaps are just Suvretta chaps. (There is no Ringo here.)
The Kulm Hotel has historically had the sporting edge of the three. Charlie Chaplin learnt to ski here, for one thing. It’s also very closely tied to the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club (the organisation behind the Cresta Run), and in the lobby is a red wooden sign, which reads “NEXT RACE: 10.40” or some such. It all lends the place a quirky atmosphere of a railway hotel, except the trains are little tea-tray sledges, manned by former British army officers and Euro industrialist heirs, skittering by unseen on some winding ice luge track located across the road.
The hotel also owns the impressive Kulm Country Club, a two-storey white building with an arcing red sign above its doors. It serves negronis in the same shade, while clubby types with strong hair eat prime rib beneath a ceiling hung with ancient sleds. The club overlooks a vast, opalescent skating rink, which was used for figure skating competitions in both the 1928 and 1948 Winter Olympics, giving the Kulm the title of the only hotel in the world to have hosted two Olympic Games.
In the hotel proper there’s another famous spot called the Sunny Bar. It’s replete with red cheeks and frost-bitten whiskers sipping the finest local reds and enjoying the heartiest of pork chops. Across the walls are plaques and photos for the great Cresta riders of the past, such as Gunter Sachs, the archetypal playboy of the 20th century, who would sashay into the bar in extravagant furs, casually shaking off a crash at Shuttlecock corner.
When a new Cresta rider wins the coveted Morgan Cup, the trophy is filled with champagne from the bar. The hotel doesn’t mind this sometimes frothy tradition, perhaps because the cup itself holds precisely 29-and-a-half bottles-worth. At other times, regulars gather around trays of bullshot, as if arriving in from some historic expedition or a very good grouse moor. The bacon sandwich is also stupendous.
Across the way, Luke Edward Hall has overseen the design for Amaru, the hotel’s modern Peruvian restaurant. It is a fitting collaboration. The artist is known for his sketches of square-jawed, heroic men and elegant figures, which are largely absent from the design here. Instead, they appear to have peeled themselves from the murals directly – and are now wandering about the lobby in various states of cashmere.
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