Cheval Blanc Courchevel

What does a billionaire want from a ski hotel? Not time, since there are staff for that, and not space, since there is probably a chalet somewhere that rarely gets used. What money cannot easily buy is certainty: the guarantee that every choice has already been made by someone with impeccable taste, so that nothing ever has to be judged. Cheval Blanc, the first of LVMH's Cheval Blanc hotels, reads like the answer to that brief, delivered on the Jardin Alpin, Courchevel 1850's most exclusive corner.

Outside, the mountain does what mountains do. The piste passes the door, larches stand dark against the snow, and late-afternoon light turns the high ridges to gold. The hotel's task is to make all this effortless. There are first tracks at dawn, before the crowds reach the lifts. Boots are warmed at the slope-side entrance; skis, helmets and goggles are gathered in the evening and returned ready for the next morning. Nobody carries anything, and nobody queues. The mountains are still there; the inconveniences have been quietly edited out.

Inside is a beautifully made object. Behind the mustard-yellow chalet front is a gallery with a mischievous streak: a mirrored horse near the entrance, a giant bear by the pool, red-lacquered walls in the restaurant and a woolly sheep beside the bed. A Louis Vuitton display occupies pride of place in reception. This is, in effect, the group's finest accessory: perfectly constructed, instantly recognisable, made to be seen. From indoors, the Alps can occasionally seem like a very expensive backdrop to the hotel.

When the formula works, it dazzles. An afternoon in the Guerlain spa, its mirror-dark pool kept bath-warm while the last skiers make for home, followed by dinner at Le 1947, where Yannick Alléno cooks for a tiny audience beneath private domes, is a sequence few Alpine hotels could improve. It is the sort of evening in which someone else has thought of everything, down to the possibility that you might prefer not to think at all.

Yet the certainty that makes the house so reassuring also keeps it at arm's length. A hotel designed to answer a brief leaves little room for surprise, or for the small human accidents that make a place loved. The service is plentiful and polished, but it follows the script more readily than it reads the guest. Every detail is correct, and correctness is not quite the same as warmth.

For the skier who is out from first lift to last and wants a flawless base, Cheval Blanc is hard to fault. Families with toddlers may find the steep stairs of the duplex suites and the general formality less forgiving. Prices are among the highest in the Alps; rooms above the bar can hear the music late, and by mid-afternoon the celebrated pistes are as crowded as anywhere in the Three Valleys. Luxury can soften the experience of a mountain, but it cannot reserve the whole mountain for itself.

Everything at Cheval Blanc has been decided in advance, and decided beautifully. The one choice left to the guest is whether that is the very definition of luxury, or its opposite.