Sonnenalp Vail

Sonnenalp Vail

The Sonnenalp takes up the corner of Vail Road beside the Covered Bridge over Gore Creek, in the middle of Vail Village, two hours west of Denver on I-70, in a town that was built in the early 1960s as an imagined Tyrolean ski village, which makes a hotel run by an actual Bavarian hotel family something of a correction. Adolf and Eleonore Faessler opened the first Sonnenalp in Ofterschwang, in the Allgäu, in 1919, and in 1979 their grandson Karlheinz and his wife Gretl bought the 38-room Wedel Inn motel here and renamed it, adding the Kiandra and Talisman lodges along Meadow Drive in 1989, rebuilding the main house in 1992 and 1993, and adding a Meadow Drive wing of 42 units and the Swiss Chalet restaurant in 2006. The result is 127 rooms, 112 of them suites and 15 hotel rooms, under shingled roofs, wooden balconies and striped shutters that match the village closely enough that you would not single the hotel out as the newer building. Their son Johannes Faessler took over in 1986 with his American wife, Rosana, and the two still run it, the fifth generation of the family in the business, with Johannes a regular presence at breakfast and in the dining rooms. Rooms have custom Bavarian furniture in oak, beamed ceilings, gas-log fireplaces in the suites, heated marble bathroom floors, double soaking tubs and separate showers, in a palette of greens and browns with Western paintings and the occasional set of antlers, all of it meant straight, without a wink. The largest suite, Castle Peak, covers 1,600 square feet over two bedrooms, and every room looks onto either Gore Creek or the village. Food runs across four rooms: Ludwig’s serves a large European breakfast on hand-painted china on a terrace above the creek, under a glass roof that slides shut when the evening cools, with the Stüberl at Ludwig’s doing a tasting menu at night, the Swiss Chalet, all carved chairs, wood panelling and red lanterns, does fondue, raclette and Zürcher Geschnetzeltes and is full most nights in season, Bully Ranch handles burgers, ribs, wild boar chili and a well-known mudslide, and the King’s Club bar has a big fireplace and live music. The spa has 27 treatment rooms, Finnish saunas, Turkish steam rooms and an indoor-outdoor pool, there is a ski lounge run with Gorsuch about fifty steps from Gondola One, and the family’s Sonnenalp Club, with golf and pickleball, is fifteen minutes down the valley in Edwards. What it feels like is an old-fashioned family hotel at a scale that should not really allow for one, a place where staff return season after season, where breakfast is the event of the day and the owner may ask how your skiing went, and where evenings end by the King’s Club fire with a band and a mostly older crowd who are not shy about requesting songs and dancing to them. Michelin gave it a Key, and the comfort is real, but nobody would call the interiors restrained, this is Gemütlichkeit taken literally, beams and fireplaces and heavy fabrics, not the kind of considered editorial restraint you might want from a boutique hotel, but warm, well kept and consistent from the lobby to the bathroom floor. It suits families who ski together and couples who want dinner, après and the spa without leaving the building, and it suits summer more than people expect, when the creek terrace opens up and the golf club comes into play. You should not come if you want design-led minimalism, a quiet bar after nine, or ski-in, ski-out access, since the lifts are a four-minute walk through the village, and if a hotel with conference rooms, a kids’ club and Christmas weeks booked solid by returning families sounds like too many people, it probably is. You should come for a German hotel family’s century-old instinct for looking after guests, a breakfast that justifies the early start, fondue at the Swiss Chalet on your first night, and a suite with a gas fire you can light the moment you come in off the mountain. The short version: A 127-room hotel in Vail Village, opened in 1979 by the Faessler family of the original 1919 Sonnenalp in Bavaria, with 112 suites, four restaurants and bars, a 27-room spa, and fifth-generation family ownership still present at breakfast.