Carlton Hotel St. Moritz

Carlton Hotel St. Moritz

The Carlton is on Via Johannes Badrutt, on the slope above St. Moritz Dorf in the Upper Engadine, roughly 1,800 metres up and three and a half hours by train from Zurich, the last stretch on the Albula line over the viaducts below Preda. It opened in 1913 as the town’s fifth five-star hotel, a few months before the First World War emptied the Engadine of foreign guests, went through closures, a brief reopening in the winter of 1947/48, and a long run of owners, until it was taken over in 1987 by the Tschuggen Hotel Group, now the Tschuggen Collection, which also owns the Tschuggen Grand in Arosa and the Eden Roc in Ascona and is controlled by the family of the late German retailer Karl-Heinz Kipp. The hotel’s old story, that Tsar Nicholas II commissioned it as a summer residence, seems to have been invented by a former owner to raise its profile, though a function room is still named the Romanoff. A renovation in 2006 and 2007 joined pairs of old bedrooms into 60 suites and junior suites, all facing south over Lake St. Moritz. They range from 75-square-metre corner junior suites to a 386-square-metre penthouse, the largest hotel suite in town. The hotel opens for winter only, December to March, and is run by Stephanie and Michael Lehnort, a married couple who share the general manager’s role, with Stephanie also acting as hostess. The interiors are by Carlo Rampazzi, the Ticinese designer known for saturated colour and expensive materials, and he has not held back: frescoes, cashmere curtains, pink silk even in the bathrooms, colour used wherever there was a surface to put it on. The food is the larger draw. Da Vittorio, the Alpine outpost of the Cerea family’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant at Brusaporto outside Bergamo, opened here in 2012 under the brothers Enrico “Chicco” and Roberto “Bobo” Cerea, earned its first star within two years and a second in 2020, and is run day to day by Paolo Rota, their brother-in-law, who cooks Lombard food for a few months of the year and then goes home. Rampazzi redesigned the dining room for the 2026/27 season. The Grand Restaurant handles the rest of the week, there is a bar and a Bel Etage for the evenings, a sun terrace with one of the better views in St. Moritz, and fondue served in old gondola cabins. The spa covers 1,200 square metres across three floors, and the Michelin Guide gave the hotel three Keys in 2024. What 60 rooms buys you here, in a town of large and famous hotels, is quiet. Badrutt’s Palace has 157 rooms and the Via Serlas at the bottom of the hill. The Carlton is far enough uphill that nobody passes through on their way somewhere else, and the service, butlers included, runs at a pace that suits a house where most guests stay a week or more. The view does a lot of the work. You wake to the frozen lake and the Engadine peaks from every suite, and the light changes across the afternoon in a way that keeps people on their balconies longer than they planned. It suits couples and families who return every winter and know what they want, and serious eaters who have booked their trip around Da Vittorio. It feels like a private house with an assertive decorator. You should not come if you want the pared-back Alpine restraint of a Vals or an Andermatt, because the Rampazzi rooms are loud and they mean it. You should not come in summer, because the hotel is closed, or if you want to ski from the door, because you will be driven or will walk down to the funicular in the village. And if the fur-and-polo theatre of St. Moritz in February sounds tiresome, the Carlton is above it but not apart from it. You should come for a south-facing suite over the lake, two Michelin stars without leaving the building, and a small hotel that has been doing this, on and off, since 1913. The short version: A 1913 grand hotel above Lake St. Moritz, reworked in 2007 into 60 south-facing suites with interiors by Carlo Rampazzi, open only in winter, with the Cerea family’s two-Michelin-starred Da Vittorio inside.