Grand Tirolia Kitzbuehel

Grand Tirolia Kitzbuehel

At the edge of Kitzbühel, built into the grounds of the Eichenheim golf course that the Californian architect Kyle Phillips laid out in 2000, the Grand Tirolia opened in 2008 and was expanded in 2018 to its present count of 145 rooms and suites, 84 rooms and 61 suites, the largest of which, the 320 square metre Grand Tirolia Suite, has its own kitchen, dining room and private sauna. The hotel belongs to the Russian businesswoman Yelena Baturina, who owns the golf course alongside it, and it now trades as the flagship of the Hommage Luxury Hotels Collection, having spent its first years as a Curio Collection by Hilton property. It is a resort in the full sense of the word, built for a clientele that arrives with golf bags in July and ski boots in January and rarely leaves the grounds for either. The interiors, reworked by the Munich firm Kitzig Interior Design, lean on oak, local stone and leather, with the region's traditional patterns redrawn at a larger, more architectural scale than a farmhouse original would allow. Herbarium serves Tyrolean cooking, Kasspressknödel and the rest, in a room with more restraint than the name suggests, while Tirolia runs a French and Swiss-inflected international menu for the nights guests want something other than dumplings. The Golf Bistro sits over the ninth green for lunch, the Cooper Bar and Lounge covers the afternoon, and the Golden Jazz Club and Bar takes over after dinner with a programme that runs later than most hotels in the valley attempt. The Grand Alps Spa spans close to 3,000 square metres, with indoor and outdoor pools, six saunas, and three yoga rooms totalling 288 square metres with unbroken views to the Kitzbühel Alps. What it feels like, once you're through the lobby, is scale: wide corridors, a KitzKids Lodge with its own cinema, an eight room conference wing and a ballroom built for 300 that keeps the hotel busy with weddings through the summer. This is not the kind of considered editorial restraint you'd get from a ten room boutique with one owner and one point of view, but the golf course and the mountains behind it do most of the work, and the hotel is honest about being built for groups, families and repeat golfers rather than for a couple wanting anonymity. You should not come if you want a small, quiet hotel where nobody else is having a wedding reception two floors down, or if a resort spa with 3,000 square metres of programming feels like more than you need. You should come for direct access to one of Austria's best golf courses, ski shuttles that run every fifteen minutes in winter, and enough space, indoors and out, that a family of four can spend a week without repeating a room. The short version: A 145-room golf and ski resort on the Eichenheim course at Kitzbühel's edge, built in 2008 for Yelena Baturina, expanded in 2018, run at full resort scale rather than boutique intimacy.