Le Coucou Méribel

Every cuckoo clock follows the same routine. On the hour, a small door flies open and the bird pops out into the daylight, only to vanish inside again a moment later. Le Coucou, high up in Méribel, has built a ski holiday on that rhythm. Its door gives directly onto the slopes of the Three Valleys, so guests can pop out onto the snow and pop back in whenever their legs ask, as many times a day as they like.

Up close, the clock is really a birdhouse, and a very grand one. Outside, it looks like any well-behaved chalet, but inside it feels like the cosy ski hut of a wealthy collector who let a Paris designer loose. Pierre Yovanovitch, on his first hotel, filled it with more than a hundred and sixty works of art and with birds wherever there is room to perch. Owls double as coat hooks and fly across the dome of the lobby, which the artist Matthieu Cossé painted as a sky full of birds. A hotel called after one bird and decorated with another is clearly not taking itself too seriously.

The ritual starts downstairs, where the boot-room staff help guests into their boots, a small mercy anyone who has fought with a frozen buckle will appreciate. A few steps later the skis are on. Coming back, guests glide off the piste almost straight into the living room, the Bar des Pistes, all midnight blue and mustard velvet, where tea waits for cold hands. Children and teenagers each get a club, which buys parents time for one more run.

Upstairs, almost half of the fifty-five rooms are suites, done in earthy pinks and greens, with balconies looking up at the peaks. In the Prestige rooms a chalet window opens between the bedroom and the marble bathroom. Two private houses, linked to the hotel by an indoor passage, are there for families wanting a nest of their own.

Once the lifts stop, the guests come in to roost. The pool begins indoors and continues outside under a row of arches, so the last swim of the day can end with snow on the terrace. For aching legs, the Tata Harper spa has six treatment rooms. On the first night, the obvious dinner is Le Fumoir, with fondue and raclette under knotty pine and checked tablecloths. When the cheese has done its work, the Beefbar takes over with rare cuts of meat.

The clock does not always run perfectly. In the busiest weeks, around Christmas and New Year, service can stretch thin. A few rooms also sit above the service area, where deliveries start early. The drive from Geneva takes well over two hours, and from spring until December the little door stays shut. Le Coucou is for families who ski and for skiers who care about design. A week is the natural length, and January or March bring calmer slopes than the holidays.

In an ordinary cuckoo clock, the bird gets a few seconds of fresh air every hour. At Le Coucou it gets some six hundred kilometres of pistes, and a warm nest to fly back to whenever it likes.