Au Coin du Feu, Megeve

Au Coin du Feu, Megeve

On the Route de Rochebrune, a five-minute walk above the centre of Megève and a couple of hundred metres from the Rochebrune cable car, Au Coin du Feu is a chalet built in 1939 by a follower of Henry-Jacques Le Même, the architect who invented the Megève skier’s chalet in the 1930s, turned into a hotel just after the war and taken over in 1981 by Jocelyne and Jean-Louis Sibuet as their first property, eight years before Les Fermes de Marie and long before the Sibuet name became shorthand for Alpine hotel style. The Sibuets moved on, the chalet stayed small, 22 rooms and suites, each with a view of the surrounding mountains, and since the mid-2010s it has belonged to Nicolas Grivet, a Marseille doctor who grew up in Sallanches, twenty minutes down the valley, and who collects Savoyard furniture and objects with the attention of someone who knows exactly which decade he wants the house to belong to. Grivet has taken the interiors back toward the 1930s, with antiques he sourced himself, fabrics woven to order by craftspeople in the Tarentaise, old wood and Mont Blanc stone, bathrooms with an Art Deco line, and, since 2020, five rooms dedicated to Le Même. The lounge is built around a large open fireplace, there is a small bar, a sauna, a hammam and a single treatment room, and no pool. Le Saint-Nicolas, the low wood-panelled dining room, is where the hotel puts its ambition, with Sébastien Tasset, who worked for Hélène Darroze and passed through the Plaza Athénée under Jean-François Piège and Lucas Carton under Alain Senderens, cooking Savoie farm eggs with chestnut and puffed buckwheat, Aravis chicken stuffed with black trumpets and foie gras, and a hot chocolate soufflé with a blueberry centre and flambéed sapinette liqueur, while Ange Mirande, a Corsican sommelier, pours a by-the-glass list that leans toward the Jura and Burgundy. It feels like the Megève that existed before the resort acquired its five-star palaces and members’ clubs, a private chalet that happens to take guests, independent, unbranded, and priced well below most of its neighbours for a dinner of this standard. The rooms are not large, the corridors creak in the right way, the fire is lit in the afternoon, and most evenings the dining room fills with guests who have not left the hotel since coming off the mountain. It suits couples, skiers who care more about dinner than après, anyone with an interest in Le Même and the architecture of the resort, and people travelling with a dog, who are welcome. You should not come if you want a pool, a full spa programme, ski-in, ski-out access, or the space and service of the Four Seasons up the hill, and you should know that the Classic rooms are small and do not offer twin beds, and that Le Saint-Nicolas serves dinner only. You should come for a 1939 chalet with a real fire, a collector’s eye on every wall, a cable car within walking distance, and a kitchen that would justify the trip from Geneva, 86 kilometres away, on its own. The short version: A 22-room 1939 chalet above the centre of Megève, the Sibuet family’s first hotel in 1981, now owned by Nicolas Grivet, with interiors returned to the spirit of Henry-Jacques Le Même and a dinner-only restaurant, Le Saint-Nicolas, run by Sébastien Tasset.