Rosewood Courchevel Le Jardin Alpin
Rosewood Courchevel Le Jardin Alpin is a luxury alpine resort located in Courchevel, France, designed by Tristan Auer. There are properties that fulfill a brief, and there are properties that seem to crystallize something – a mood, a memory, an argument about what luxury can actually feel like. Rosewood’s debut winter resort occupies the latter category. Perched within the storied Jardin Alpin enclave of Courchevel 1850, with direct access to Les Trois Vallées, the project arrives with the quiet confidence of something that knows exactly what it is.
The challenge Auer faced was one of temporal translation – how to honor the mythologized glamour of 1960s alpine travel while producing something genuinely contemporary rather than merely nostalgic. When Courchevel opened the world’s first mountain airport in 1961, it became a stage for a very particular kind of postwar luxury, defined by physical arrival, by the theater of descent, by bodies in motion against dramatic natural backdrops. His response treats the chalet typology not as a historical document but as a living spatial argument about materiality and craft – and it is one of the more convincing such arguments in recent alpine hospitality.
The facade establishes the project’s tonal register immediately. Vals Quartzite – the same Swiss stone associated with Peter Zumthor’s thermal baths in Vals – grounds the building in geological time, while copper accents and hand-carved local timber introduce the human scale that prevents alpine grandeur from tipping into institutional coldness. This calibration between the elemental and the intimate runs through every layer of the interior, and it never wavers.
The salt block bars in select suites are among the most formally inventive gestures in the project. Himalayan salt absorbs and refracts light rather than reflecting it, producing a diffused warmth that shifts with the hour. Angled to echo the surrounding mountain silhouettes, these forms make the geological reference literal without becoming decorative. The custom Carapace wall lights fashioned from the same material extend the logic, reinforcing a material consistency that feels more architectural than ornamental.
At SALTO, the bar base carved by chainsaw makes craft labor visible in a way that most luxury interiors carefully conceal. The reference to mountain woodcutters is not merely atmospheric – it acknowledges that alpine material culture was shaped by specific tools and specific bodies, and that the most compelling luxury can be built from this acknowledgment rather than in spite of it. The translucent gold-infused glass bar top introduces the glacier reference, completing a composition that holds industrial and natural registers in productive tension. Under Chef Gioia Baek, whose trajectory runs from Seoul through the Michelin-starred kitchens of Bergamo, the culinary program carries the same spirit – deeply rooted, yet entirely its own.
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