It has been more than twenty years since we lived in the Savoie region of France. During the winters of 2001 to 2003, rented the Perfect French Chalet in Val d'Isère. This time, we decided to rent a ski in/ski out apartment in Tignes, the neighboring town, for 7 weeks. Boy, has the area changed!
Our first week in Tignes at the hotel Les Suites du Montana
After our ordeal getting to Tignes, we settled into the Suite Privilège at Les Suites du Montana. Our first impression was not good but once we settled in we were happy enough. The suite was on the first floor across from the ski room. We thought it would be noisy but it wasn't. We thought that it would be dark but we had a nice view of the slopes and La Toviere. At 60 square meters (645 square feet), it was big enough for the two of us and there was good storage. However, it was not the suite that we saw on the hotel's website which we would have liked better.
We spent about US$672 a night for a suite with three smallish rooms--the salon and two bedrooms. The salon had a sofa, coffee table, a desk, a table with chairs, and a large heating furnace like the one in our Italian apartment. There was a large TV screen but not many channels were activated. We had a balcony too. The main bedroom had bedside tables, a chest of drawers, and an armoire. The twin bedroom had a small bathroom and an armoire. The main bathroom had a sauna as well as a hydromassage tub. There was also a second toilet in the hallway. When we arrived there was a large plate of fruits, and jars of jam, nuts, sweets, and cookies. It was a nice welcome plate. The staff was very, very nice and we enjoyed talking to each of them. Our luggage was delivered to the suite as were the packages that we had ordered online. One of the suitcases that we sent with ShipSkis was already in the room (damaged) and the skis (undamaged) arrived two days after we arrived. Our rental Citroën SUV was parked in the garage for us.
The breakfast buffet was complete and eggs were ordered separately. Daniel and the staff in the restaurant were lovely and helpful.
Les Suites du Montana bills itself as 5-star and it does check many 5-star boxes. The quality of the offerings just didn't make the grade, however. Our suite was well-outfitted but definitely not luxe. There was no individual control for the heat which was a problem. Without opening windows, the temperature in the salon hovered around 77°F (25°C) and in the bedroom 73°F (23°C). In the bedrooms and the bathrooms, there were heated towel racks but without the option to set a temperature.
The gym was tiny with terrible equipment. The steam room needed tender-loving care and our suite needed lots of maintenance. The technician was nice and fixed many but not all of the problems. We like to take showers. In the main bathroom, the handheld showerhead could only be mounted on the wall pointing straight out, not down into the tub. In the second bathroom, the handheld could not be mounted on the wall at all because the screen was placed on the wrong side of the tub. All of the water from it would have ended up on the floor.
We drove our rental car to Val d'Isère on our first day; maneuvering out of the space in the garage and up the ramps was nearly impossible it was so tight. From then on we had Adrien or Lohan bring the car out of the hotel. In Val d'Isère we found Chalet Les Ecrins, the Perfect French Chalet we rented for two winters: 2001 to 2003. The new owner had totally reconfigured it into a house with many tiny bedrooms. It was awful. No wonder our landlords did not respond when we contacted them to tell them we were returning to the area.
On our first few nights, we took the hotel's shuttle to the restaurants with Adrien or Lohan taking us and picking us up. Then Dimitri started driving if the restaurant we were going to had parking. Parking in public lots was a nightmare because the spaces were small and maneuvering was difficult.
Our skis arrived Monday of our first week and on Tuesday, we skied. Les Suites du Montana was ski in/ski out with a short walk out (or in) the door to the slopes. There was a problem though. Along the walkway, there was a huge mound of icy snow to walk over. We asked the staff to remove it and the solution was to put rubber mats over it. We had trouble carrying our skis and navigating it. The skiing conditions were dure and glacée so not optimal. But the sky was gloriously blue and the temperature lovely. We had a very French lunch on the mountain (coquille Saint Jacques) sitting outside at Lo Soli. We knew we were in France; not for the quality of the snow but instead for the culture. When we skied again we found better slopes (north-facing). One day we skied until 5 pm--the sun was still shining.
All of the restaurants we went to for dinner during our first week were good and our meals, sharing a starter, a main, and a dessert, were around US$70 without wine or coffee. We were happy about that.
During our first week we needed to get into the rhythm of a small town in France. We would arrive at the grocery store and it would be closed. Oh yes, many establishments close at noon and re-open whenever, like 3 or 4 or 5. If we didn't get to a restaurant by 1:30 for lunch, they would have stopped serving. Things like that take time to adjust to. Very charming.
Our next 7 weeks at Résidence Boutique Lodge des Neiges
The staff at Résidence Boutique Lodges de Neiges made our stay excellent. Our apartment, designated for 6 people, was around 50 sq. meters/500 square feet and, with it’s bleached wood, looked very IKEA (and cost €600 per day, plus parking). While we despaired when we saw the apartment, we actually fit in the space. We unpacked everything, put it away and the staff stored our suitcases.
Our apartment had two bedrooms, each with a normal-sized closet and it had two bathrooms. There was no chest of drawers but we put stuff on the closet shelves and that worked. The second bedroom was our clothes closet for our ski and sports clothes. We had a ski locker for our skis and boots too.
The living room/dining room/kitchenette was big enough to have Dimitri’s laptop table and chair as well. We bought an etagere in the bigger nearby town of Bourg St. Maurice and we put our electric coffee maker, our Nespresso machine, our water boiler, and bowls of fruit on it to make room in the kitchenette to actually do food prep. There was a full size closet in the hallway that became the pantry.
Our apartment was at the end of the building and the windows on that wall faced north, with magnificent views of the Mont Blanc Massif and the Aiguille de tré-la-tête in Italy.
From our
apartment windows: Aiguille de tré-la-tête in Italy on the left and the Mont
Blanc Massif on the right
Our ceilings were high and slanted with beams and there was no one above us. Our apartment actually had a loft but it was off-limits to us. We re-arranged the furniture in the living room so the sofa faced the balcony/ski slope in front of the building. The chest that the minuscule TV sat on was good for storage. There were only three apartments on our floor and we almost never heard any noise whatsoever.
Our bedroom was big enough to have Audre’s laptop table and a chair. It also had useful bedside tables, with table lamps. The staff bought us two humidifiers which we desperately needed. We had parking under the building with elevator access.
The building was
indeed ski in/ski out, without any walking. Tignes 1800/Les Boisses had a
gondola going up. Coming back, access on skis was on a long cat track that, in
the afternoons, was more like a luge-taboggan track. We could take the gondola
down but that meant carrying our skis uphill to our building. We did that once.
We had brilliant days during February with almost no snow. The conditions continued to deteriorate. While at the highest points, the north-facing slopes were good enough and were groomed well enough, they got skied off and became ice skating rinks quickly. We are too old to take chances on slopes like that. That resulted in our not skiing much. When we ventured out in March, sometimes it was okay and sometimes it was survival skiing. There just wasn't enough new snow.
We used our
gym, did our stretching/toning on the yoga mats we bought, and then found lovely
areas to hike with crampons. When we skied or hiked, we found perfectly French
places to have lunch afterwards. One of the pleasures of being in France is
eating the French
Food at French Restaurants.
We used the steam room and the Jacuzzi in the building and liked them. The staff even increased the temperature of the Jacuzzi when we asked. It was still not as warm as we would have liked. By going into the steam room first, we could build up enough heat to make the Jacuzzi experience pas terrible, bad-but not terrible. We could order baguette and croissants to be delivered to our door at about 8 am the next morning. That was a wonderful service that many apartment buildings provided.
After Audre started cooking in the minuscule kitchen, we drove down the curvy mountain road to go to the hypermarché Bourg St Maurice. For a town of about 10,000, the shopping was great. And, Audre had a blast—she loved the produce, the cheese, the fish, and everything else. She announced to Dimitri when we were driving back to Tignes that she wanted to live in France, and she really liked it. And she really loved the language. It is so beautiful, and she loved hearing it spoken all around her.
Dimitri's fluency in French was really impressive. Every day, it got more melodious. People asked how he spoke so perfectly, and he answered, "Lycée Francais en Egypte." Well, that explanation just raised more questions!
We met with Stéven Emily Residence Manager of Le Lodge des Neiges. He managed all of the properties of CGH Group in Tignes. He showed us other apartment options and basically said we had the best apartment of all that CGH had. We asked Stéven why all the accommodations (except hotels) require guests to arrive and leave on Saturdays. He said that allows the accommodation to remain full (without gaps). It also results in the roads being clogged on Saturdays in both directions (and the ski runs to be kind of empty on Saturdays).
We spent an enormous amount of time looking for accommodation for our subsequent stays in France. It was very discouraging. If an apartment had sufficient square meters, it was chopped up into many minuscule bedrooms, leaving insufficient living space. We despaired. We also decided that Tignes was not where we wanted to find our accommodation--it lacked charm. And, Les Boisses (Tignes 1800) was just too low and far away, making the trek home at the end of the day tedious. Val d'Isère was much more to our liking.
In the meantime, Audre's permission to stay in France was going nowhere. After filing the application, we got questions from a robot, answered them, and then waited impatiently. We had to go to Lyon to the Consule Honoraire de la République Hellénique à Lyon to get an Acte of Concordance, as requested by the French authorities, for Dimitri's name. In his Greek passport, his name is spelled Dimitrios, as is customary in the Greek language. The letter from the Consul just makes it official that Dimitri and Dimitrios are one and the same. Going to Lyon in March was a good getaway for us.
We had a wonderful time attending the Classicalval concert in the église de Saint Bernard de Menthon in Val d'Isère. It was built in 1664 and was very atmospheric and cold. The seats were unbelievably uncomfortable. All that being said, the concert was very entertaining. Most of the other attendees were "personnes âgées" like us. Indeed, we were sitting next to a couple from Frankfurt and the South of France who were about our age. They were very "sympathique" and we had a nice time talking to them while we waited for the concert to begin. The concert was with piano, violin, and cello with music by Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Mendelsohn, Dvorak, and D. Popper (whoever he is); we liked the music.
The concert was sponsored by the Val d'Isère Office du Tourisme and we finagled tickets to the special cocktail musical at the l'hotel les Barmes de l'Ours the next night. It was great fun and we saw and talked to our seatmate friends, Uschi and Remy, too. The music was good, and the appetizers that Les Barmes de l'Ours served were also good.
We actually booked a reservation for a 10-day stay in April at Les Barmes de l'Ours, which completed our winter in France.
We found a seafood (actually everything) buffet at the Solstice Restaurant at the Yule Hotel in Val d'Isère that we really liked and went to twice. The oysters and the foie gras were exceptionally good. We always had fun talking to people. In fact, we met a woman from the south of France when we were hiking in the Vallee du Manchet and told her about the Solstice Buffet. We met her and her husband, Jean-Nöel there. We had fun talking to them.
Speaking of seafood, our local Spar grocery store in Les Boisses (Tignes 1800) had an arrangement with a poissonnier to bring in seafood platters. For €95, they prepared a takeaway platter of 12 oysters, langoustines, welk, shrimp, one whole lobster, and one whole crab. The shellfish were cooked properly, and it was a feast for 3 dinners! Those were good dinners, as were the dinners with the seafood we bought from the poissonnier in Val d'Isère who came on Tuesdays.
Our 10 days in April at Les Barmes de l'Ours in Val d'Isère
Well, we decided to splurge on a Suite Privilège at Les Barmes de l'Ours in Val d'Isère. It is a 5-star Relais & Châteaux with a one-Michelin-starred restaurant. The suite we booked might be big enough, even though it is just one big room of 60 square meters (without a second bedroom for our ski clothes and without a second bathroom for our comfort). At over US$1400 a night, it is clearly the most expensive room we have ever booked in our lives. We will also find out whether it is really ski-in/ski-out.
Briançon
We will leave Val d’Isère on April 8 and will spend 5 nights in
Briançon to check out the Serre Chevalier ski area, which had been suggested by the Greek Consul in Lyon. We have not found
accommodation for three months in 2026 in Tignes, Val d’Isère, or Courchevel
that we like (if the space is large enough, it is generally cut up into too
many bedrooms, and the living space is not to our liking). At the 1000€ ++ per
day charges that these areas command, we would not be happy. The southern
French Alps seem to have more options for ski-in/ski-out, affordable, large
enough accommodation. Of course, it is too far south and too low.
After Briançon, we will
spend a couple of weeks in Lyon in a large apartment in a luxurious Relais
& Châteaux that will put every apartment we’ve seen here to shame. We go
back to Vail on April 29th.
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