Hotel La Margna

Hotel La Margna

St. Moritz station, the terminus of the Glacier Express, is a hundred metres from the door of Grace La Margna on Via Serlas, in the upper Engadin valley of Graubünden, where the Swiss architect Nicolaus Hartmann built the original hotel in 1906 to 1907 in the Engadin Art Nouveau style, added three storeys to its east wing in 1911, and where the Schweizer-Pitsch family ran it as La Margna for fifty years from the mid-1960s before selling to Grace Hotels in 2013. The building then stood closed for seven years, until restoration began in spring 2021 under Divercity Architects of London and Athens, who repaired the old La Margna Wing and added the Grace Wing beside it, joined by a glazed passage, with interiors by Carole Topin. The hotel now has 74 rooms and suites, 32 of them suites, and reopened in 2023 as the first hotel under the Grace Hotels name, with David Frei as general manager. In the old wing the roof is still covered in the original Val Fex slate, and inside, Hartmann’s granite pillars, plasterwork and wooden panelling have been restored around the Living Room, a hall with a vaulted ceiling where afternoon tea is served by the fire, while the Grace Wing is plainer and more glazed, with floor-to-ceiling windows, larger rooms in muted neutral tones, and at the top a three-bedroom penthouse with a wraparound roof terrace and a Jacuzzi. Food runs through The View, a circular restaurant with a pizza oven, a Mediterranean menu, a slatted timber ceiling and olive-green upholstery, and The Stack, a brasserie and steakhouse with a walk-in wine cellar and a timbered booth for six, with MaxMoritz downstairs for fondue and seasonal pop-ups, and No.5, a bar in the lobby lounge with a solid marble counter, parquet floors and wrought-iron chandeliers. The spa covers 700 square metres, with a heated 20-metre pool, a hydrotherapy pool, a steam room and a sauna, and there is a kids’ club designed by MyLittleRoom of Geneva. It is a looser proposition than the grandes dames of St. Moritz, and a smaller one, with 74 rooms against the 157 at Badrutt’s Palace, which suits a stay built around the town and not around the institution. It is one of the few hotels in the resort open 365 days a year, and the lobby bar is its centre of gravity, a room that locals use as readily as guests do. The choice that matters is between the wings, the La Margna rooms being cosier and carrying period features, the Grace rooms larger, more contemporary and glazed to the lake, and since a good deal of the hotel has existed only since 2023, it reads as a new hotel with an old building attached, which will please some temperaments more than others. You should not come if you want the lake to yourself, because Via Serlas is a shopping street with Hermès, Louis Vuitton and Cartier a short walk down it, nor if you want to ski from the door, because Corviglia is a funicular ride away, nor if the draw is a century of unbroken hotel history, because the building spent seven years closed and the Grace Wing is new. You should come if you want to arrive by train and walk everywhere, if you are travelling with children (the suites include sofabeds, and the kids’ club is a proper one) or with a dog (welcome in the Grace Wing), and if you want a good spa, a bar with a local following and a choice of two restaurants within the building, in a hotel that does not close between seasons. The short version: A 74-room hotel on Via Serlas in St. Moritz, combining Nicolaus Hartmann’s 1906 Art Nouveau building with a new wing by Divercity Architects, a hundred metres from the railway station, with a 700-square-metre spa, two restaurants and a bar.