Suvretta House

Suvretta House

Suvretta House stands on the Chasellas plateau at 1,800 metres, in a forest of Swiss stone pines and larches about a mile above St. Moritz and ten minutes by road from the station, in a corner of the Upper Engadine whose name means house above the woods. It opened on 16 December 1912, after building began in 1911, the work of the Swiss hotelier Anton Sebastian Bon, who engaged the architect Karl Koller together with the Englishman Charles Sydney Goldman, a member of parliament, and it has 181 rooms and suites today. Bon died in 1915 and his widow Maria took over the running of the house, and it has stayed in the Candrian-Bon family ever since, now in its seventh generation, which is rare among the grand Swiss hotels of that date, with Esther and Peter Egli in charge as general managers since May 2014. The rooms were redone in stages, the east wing gutted in 2003 and the west wing in 2006, and the ten suites run from 100 to 130 square metres with south-facing balconies or terraces, while the 32 single rooms start at 20. The largest recent change is the Suvretta Spa, designed by the Swiss architects Ritter Schumacher, 4,670 square metres across three and a half floors, which opened in December 2025 after the hotel stayed closed through the summer and autumn, only the second time it has done so. The Grand Restaurant is the formal dining room, run by the St. Moritz-born executive chef Fabrizio Zanetti with a French and seasonal menu, and higher up the hill are two mountain restaurants, Chasellas under head chef Marco Kind and Trutz under Fabio Olla, joined in summer by the Suvretta-Randolins chairlift. It is the only ski-in, ski-out hotel in St. Moritz, with its own lift onto Corviglia and a ski school that opened in 1925 as the Suvretta-Champfèr Ski School. The house has the feel of a place that has outlasted most of its guests’ fashions without apologising for it, and the people who stay tend to have done so before, with parents or children, which accounts for the expanded Kiddy Club and the Englishness that visitors have noted since Bon’s first seasons. Nijinsky gave his last public performance in the ballroom in 1919, Thomas Mann treated the place as a refuge from the society downtown, and the hotel still keeps that distance, being close enough to town to reach and far enough from it that evenings are spent in the building. It suits people who like a large old hotel run by one family, where the formality is part of the arrangement and the mountains are the main entertainment. You should not come if you want to walk out of the door into the shops and bars of St. Moritz, since you are a mile above them and will feel it every evening, or if a formal dress code in the main dining room will irritate you, or if you want a small, new, design-led hotel with a handful of rooms. You should come if you want to ski from the door, if you are travelling with several generations or with children, if you prefer a hotel with a century of continuous ownership behind it, or if the idea of a long spa afternoon followed by dinner in a jacket sounds like a good day. The short version: A 181-room grand hotel above St. Moritz, opened in 1912 and still owned by the Candrian-Bon family, with its own ski lift onto Corviglia, a 4,670 square metre spa opened in December 2025, and a formal dining room.