Hôtel Saint Roch Courchevel

Après-ski in the Alps has followed the same script for generations: vin chaud, a bubbling fondue, a sheepskin over the back of the chair. Saint Roch tears it up. At four o'clock, with boots still steaming from the Bellecôte piste outside the door, the drink here is something cold and the snack is a tin of caviar. It is, by some distance, the most flamboyant grand address in Courchevel 1850.

The caviar is no gimmick. Saint Roch is one of the old names of the resort, and the house belongs to Maisons Pariente, a French family collection run by the sisters Leslie Kouhana and Kimberley Cohen, who handed the kitchen to Prunier, the Parisian house that taught the city to eat caviar. Up the mountain comes the whole repertoire: French caviar, wild salmon, tarama, towering platters of shellfish, fish filleted at the table and a burger to settle any argument. The kitchen serves all day, so a spoonful of caviar in ski socks is not a stunt. It is simply the menu.

The decor is just as unapologetic. The interior architects Virginie Friedmann and Delphine Versace threw the catalogue chalet out of the window and went east, to the dachas of Russia, the palaces of the Caucasus and the lost kingdoms of Persia. The walls are tobacco, garnet, moss and midnight blue, the windows glow with agate-stained glass, mosaics shimmer in the corners, and art hangs everywhere. Courchevel has dressed in cream wool and blond wood for half a century. Saint Roch prefers garnet velvet and a fur hat.

Flamboyance is easier to forgive when it is this convenient. Guests click into their skis on the doorstep and stroll to the bars of the village in their après boots, a pairing few addresses in 1850 can match without a shuttle. For a family or a party of friends, the whole top floor can be taken as one, a private dacha with the piste at its windows.

Even the steam has travelled. The spa borrows from Ottoman hammams and Caucasian palaces, right down to a shower clad in marble mosaic, while the living room keeps a fire lit and hot chocolate on hand for the unconverted.

Like every big personality, Saint Roch divides a room. After a week of pale, pared-back Savoyard chalets, the dark, layered interiors can be a lot to take in, and fondue purists will have to make their peace with the sea. The bill, like everything else in 1850, is priced for the altitude, and like the lifts, the house sleeps through the summer.

Its name belongs to the patron saint of pilgrims, who, legend says, survived in a forest on the bread a dog brought him every day. The pilgrims of Courchevel are better provided for. At four o'clock, the bread arrives with caviar.