Airelles Val d'Isère

French uses a single word for a keepsake and a memory, and luxury hotels have long dealt in the first kind: the bathrobe, the scented candle, the monogrammed pen. Airelles Val d'Isère, the least known and least theatrical house in the Airelles collection, hands those out too, nightly and in quantity. Its real business is the second kind of souvenir, and in pursuit of it the hotel goes much further than a ski hotel strictly needs to.

The setting is a skier's town rather than a showman's. Val d'Isère is a stone village at 1,850 metres on the edge of the Vanoise National Park, with the Olympic downhill plunging down the Face de Bellevarde above its rooftops. On its snow front stood the Brussel's, an old favourite of the resort, rebuilt and reopened in 2019 behind a sober face of wood and stone. Inside, Christophe Tollemer chose timelessness over costume: great fireplaces, a monumental staircase, velvet banquettes and period furniture, warm rather than whimsical.

The keepsakes arrive on cue. At dusk candlelight takes over the lobby, along with a table of homemade sweets that never seems to empty, and in Le Fumoir, the cigar lounge, guests pour their own drinks at an honour bar and note them down. Each night something new appears on the pillow, ski socks, pyjamas, a bottle of perfume, and a ski jacket in the house colours waits in the wardrobe, to be worn and kept.

The other kind of souvenir begins where most ski hotels stop. On the hotel's all-in formula, the lift pass and the equipment are merely the overture. Each day brings an expedition, included and arranged down to the gloves: a sled pulled by a team of dogs, snowmobiles across frozen plateaus, snowshoes through silent larches, and, most improbable of all, a dive beneath the frozen surface of Lake Tignes, a short drive up the road.

That dive is the closest thing the Alps have to a magic trick. A hole is cut through the ice with a chainsaw, a line runs back to the surface, and below lies water barely above freezing, lit by a milky, diffuse glow. Every breath rises, meets the frozen ceiling and spreads across it like quicksilver, a moving mirror overhead. By evening the same guests sit over fondue at La Grande Ourse, an inn on the slopes since 1936, beneath a protected fresco of stars attributed to the painter Jean Fautrier.

A week built for memories can start to feel like a programme. There are more sweets, gifts, courses and expeditions than any guest can do justice to, the lake decides when its ice is ready, and the dive asks for nerve as well as a drysuit. Beyond the door, Val d'Isère remains a lively, unpolished ski town, loved by the British and loud after dark, with more rental shops than boutiques.

Years later, the pyjamas will have worn thin and the jacket will hang forgotten at the back of a cupboard. What stays is the quicksilver light under the ice and a team of dogs running into the dusk. In French, both count as souvenirs. Only one kind ever needed a suitcase.