Kulm Hotel St. Moritz

Kulm Hotel St. Moritz

At 1,856 metres above sea level, a figure the hotel enjoys noting is also the year it opened, the Kulm runs along a terrace above Lake St. Moritz in the Upper Engadine, a little over three hours by train from Zurich with a change at Chur, and it has a fair claim to being the place the Alpine winter holiday began. Johannes Badrutt and his wife Maria Berry took on the 12-room Pension Faller in 1856, bought it two years later for 28,500 francs, and in 1864 made his famous wager with four English summer guests (come back in December, and if you don’t enjoy it I’ll cover your costs) that kept them in the valley until Easter. What followed reads as a ledger of firsts: Switzerland’s first electric light, switched on in the dining room in 1879, the Cresta Run built on hotel land in 1884, the Olympia Bob Run in 1904, and the opening ceremonies of the 1928 and 1948 Winter Olympics held in the Kulm Park. Stavros Niarchos bought the hotel in 1968, when Club Méditerranée started showing interest, and his family still owns it, along with the Grand Hotel Kronenhof in nearby Pontresina. There are 150 rooms and suites spread across the original house, the 1886 west wing by Nicolaus Hartmann and the 1912 Neukulm, and since 2013 the hotel has been run by Heinz E. Hunkeler, whose father managed it from 1972, and his wife Jenny Hunkeler, both graduates of the École hôtelière de Lausanne. Most rooms have been redone since 2015 by the French designer Pierre-Yves Rochon, in deep blues and Bordeaux reds with lacquered walls and Swiss stone pine ceilings, while the most historically intact rooms keep their old panelling and can still be booked as the “alpine” variant, which some regulars prefer. The lobby is Renzo Mongiardino’s trompe l’oeil, painted in 1993. Food is spread across six restaurants: Mauro Colagreco, of Mirazur in Menton, cooks over the grill at the Kulm Country Club, a 1905 ice pavilion that Norman Foster restored for CHF 12 million ahead of the 2017 World Ski Championships; Claudia Canessa runs Amaru, a Peruvian dining room with interiors by Luke Edward Hall; the London chef Tom Booton cooks winter-only brasserie food at the Sunny Bar, open since 1884 and still the clubhouse of the Cresta riders; and executive chef Mauro Taufer oversees the Grand Restaurant’s nightly menus and the pizzeria. The spa covers 2,000 square metres, with an indoor pool facing the lake, and the park holds a nine-hole golf course laid out in 1896, the highest in the Alps, plus tennis courts at Chesa al Parc that become an ice rink in winter. In 2025 Foster + Partners turned the old ski room into a lounge with a bar, a boutique and a ski concierge. This is a large, long, old grand hotel, and it behaves like one, with corridors that reward knowing in advance whether you want to be near the lifts, the spa or the dining rooms, and a Grand Restaurant that still dresses for dinner. Days are organised around sport in a way few luxury hotels bother with now: the Corviglia funicular is a short walk away, the Cresta starts more or less at the door, and guests skate where Olympians once did. The crowd is multigenerational and loyal, with British, Italian and Swiss families who have been coming for decades, and the Kulm is less fashionable than Badrutt’s Palace down the road, which works in its favour, as it feels more like an institution than a scene. Worth knowing: in 2025 the hotel announced a CHF 125 million master plan by Foster + Partners, to be carried out over six to seven years, so expect works in places, particularly during the summer seasons. You should not come if you want a small, design-led hotel where the staff know your name by the second morning, or if you want quiet in February, when the village is at its busiest and the hotel’s conference rooms can hold 500. It is also seasonal, open roughly December to March and June to August, so spring and autumn are off the table. You should come for history you can actually use, the bar where the Cresta riders drink, the bob run, the lake view at breakfast, and the slightly odd pleasure of staying in the building where winter tourism was talked into existence. The short version: A 150-room grand hotel on a terrace above Lake St. Moritz, founded by Johannes Badrutt in 1856, owned by the Niarchos family since 1968, with the Cresta Run and Olympia Bob Run starting on its grounds, and a fair claim to having invented the Alpine winter holiday.