Gstaad Palace

Text and Photography by Mart Engelen

The first time I visited Gstaad was more than forty years ago. I was a young law student in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and Michael, a fellow student and fanatical skier, suggested a short skiing holiday in Gstaad. So we hopped into my old Renault 4 with summer tyres (remember, I am talking about the late 1970s) and set off towards the Swiss Alps. On the way, Michael asked to make a stop in Montreux. I said, “Why?”. “Well,” he said, “I love to play roulette and I hear they have a wonderful casino in Montreux, so I can make some extra pocket money.” We stopped in Montreux and, of course, in a split second, he had lost all his holiday money. In Gstaad we managed to rent a room from an old farmer in a beautiful ancient chalet on the ski slope. At night, we went to the famous GreenGo nightclub in the Gstaad Palace, which really was an incredible place, filled with the rich and famous of the day. It was like a Swiss chalet version of Studio 54 in NY.
And now, after all this time, I was checking in at this majestic fairy-tale palace. Nestled on a hill, the Gstaad Palace overlooks the beautiful town and offers breath-taking views of the Swiss Alps. Right away, my beautifully refurbished but cosy junior suite gave me a home-away-from-home feeling.
This luxury icon opened in December 1913 and has been owned and managed for over eighty years by three generations of the Scherz family. Guests are treated like members of the extended family. Big names who have checked in have included Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, Grace Kelly, Roger Moore and Madonna and many others have spent a great deal of time here. The Palace, like Gstaad itself, is opulent but never ostentatious. There is plenty of peoplewatching, but it is never cheesy or nouveau riche. As a guest, you have absolutely no need to leave the property because The Palace provides fine dining in five restaurants and its numerous amenities include the GreenGo nightclub, the 1,800 square metre Palace Spa and indoor and outdoor pools.
We enjoyed an extraordinary dinner at the hotel’s Le Grand Restaurant; the appetizers ‘Paccheri alla gricia’ and ‘Vitello tonnato’ were a perfect combination with the main course, a superb ‘Poussin rôti au four, variations autour de la carotte et pommes duchesse’. Another night we went for real Swiss cuisine, opting for the fantastic Champagne truffle fondue in La Fromagerie, which, by the way, had been a two-storey bunker where the Swiss government hid a large portion of the country’s gold reserves during World War II.