Comes With Full Service: The Lodge at Courchevel (Photo credit: Savills, London)Savills, London
Courchevel 1850 is the most exclusive of the Three Valleys resorts, a tiny enclave of superior chalets and with unfettered access to some of the best snow in the Alps. Add to those assets the almost-like-a-hotel service of the Six Senses concierge operation as your house managers, and the price grazing $15 million starts to make sense.
The Lodge, as it is impressively named, occupies three floors, and includes, in addition to the five bedrooms, each with its own bath, a screening room, a bespoke kitchen, fetching outdoor dining areas on balconies, and for those aches and pains incurred on Courchevel’s rather daunting slopes, a sauna, a hammam, a Jacuzzi.  That’s if you don’t want to trip down to the Six Senses spa itself.
But it’s the management and depth of the concierge services — also through Six Senses — that puts The Lodge into the upper grades of chalet. The concierge team is at your beck and call round the clock, seven days a week, for transport, catering, and cleaning. Need a chef for a dinner party for ten ski buddies? No problem. The word that expresses the freedom that this represents in the chalet-hospitality trade is ‘lock up and leave.’ There’s a lot in that phrase. It means: money.