Kronenhof Grand Hotel

Kronenhof Grand Hotel

Ten minutes by road from St Moritz, on Via Maistra in the Laret quarter of Pontresina, next to the San Niculò protestant church, the Kronenhof began in 1848 as the Gasthaus Rössli, bought by Andreas Gredig for his son Lorenz Gredig, then twenty-two, who renamed it first Gasthaus zur Krone-Post and later simply Krone. Between 1896 and 1898, the architects Jakob and Georg Ragaz rebuilt it into the horseshoe-shaped, three-winged structure that stands today, with its own cour d'honneur, and the property took the name Kronenhof & Bellavista. The Gredig family ran it for more than 140 years before it passed to Grand Hotels Engadinerkulm, the group that owns it now. It has 112 rooms, including nine suites, and is listed in the Swiss Inventory of Cultural Property of National and Regional Significance. The reception hall, redesigned in recent years by the French interior architect Pierre-Yves Rochon, sits under a vaulted ceiling dated 1872, painted by Otto Haberer, known in his day as Switzerland's hotel painter. Rochon's most recent work, completed for the hotel's 175th anniversary in 2023, added the Kronenhof Suite and ten further rooms in a lighter palette than the rest of the house. Downstairs, the Kronenstübli restaurant keeps its pine wainscoting and vaulted tavern ceiling from 1937 and 1938, the work of the architect Nikolaus Hartmann Jr., who also built the hotel's wooden ice pavilion in 1933. Between the three restaurants, the kitchens hold sixteen GaultMillau points, and dinner at the Grand Restaurant still asks gentlemen for a jacket. In the cellar, a stock of Valtellina wine, laid down as a side business under Lorenz Gredig, kept the hotel solvent through both world wars when almost no guests came. The spa runs to more than 2,000 square metres, and there is a bowling alley and a cigar lounge for those who came for the Belle Époque of it all, not the treatments. What it feels like is a grand hotel that has kept its own furniture rather than replacing it with the industry's idea of what a grand hotel should look like now, so the scale is real: the ballroom takes four hundred for a conference, and the Lobby Lounge two hundred and fifty for a reception, and none of it feels retrofitted for Instagram. The views run to the Roseg Glacier and the Bernina peaks, and the hotel sits close enough to St Moritz to borrow its skiing and shopping without absorbing its crowd. It suits travellers who like formality worn easily, who don't mind a jacket at dinner, and who find a 175-year-old wine cellar more interesting than a rooftop bar. You should not come if you want a small, quiet, owner-run boutique property, or if the idea of sharing the ballroom with a four-hundred-person conference some weeks a year puts you off (the hotel does a serious events business alongside its leisure guests). You should come for a working grand hotel that has stayed in more or less continuous use since 1848, for the wine cellar, for the Ragaz brothers' architecture, and for a version of Alpine luxury that predates the word. The short version: A neo-baroque grand hotel in Pontresina, Upper Engadin, open since 1848, rebuilt by the Ragaz brothers in the 1890s, with 112 rooms, a 1,872-painted vault by Otto Haberer, and a Valtellina wine cellar that carried it through two world wars.