Le K2 Chogori

Say Saint Bernard and most people picture a large dog with a barrel of brandy round its neck. In Val d'Isère the name belongs first to the village church, whose stone spire rises over the old quarter, and Le K2 Chogori sits right beneath it. A thousand years ago the saint built shelters for travellers crossing the Alps. His neighbour is in the same business, with considerably better beds.

The building used to be Le Meurice, an old-school Val d'Isère hotel. The Capezzone family rebuilt it as two linked chalets of wood and slate and named it Chogori, the local name for K2, which means the big mountain. It is a big name for twenty-one rooms, and the small scale is exactly the appeal. Suzanne and Philippe Capezzone are usually somewhere between the lobby and the bar, their son Thomas designed the interiors and their daughter Emily runs the dining room. Within a day, everyone in the house knows everyone's name.

The first surprise is the front door, heavy dark wood inscribed in Sanskrit, a nod to the Himalaya behind the name. Inside it is all stone, timber and low light, calm rather than showy. Rooms are spacious and most of them connect, so families take two or three and turn a corridor into their own apartment, while the two penthouses under the roof suit a group of friends. Being in the old village means church bells in the morning rather than après-ski bass at night.

The ski room does the heavy lifting: boots are warmed overnight and the gear stands ready. The Bellevarde lifts are a few minutes on foot, or a shuttle ride for anyone in no mood to carry skis through the village. Back at the hotel, a pool, sauna and hammam wait downstairs, along with a games room for the children, which buys their parents an hour of peace.

The social heart of the house is the bar called 1954, after the year K2 was first climbed, where tea and pastries slide into the first cocktail of the evening as the fire gets going. Dinner is at Le Bottleneck, a room of fifty seats where Bastien Paysant cooks over embers. The fondues come from a second Bernard: Bernard Mure-Ravaud, one of France's master cheesemongers. Outside guests want those tables too, so they go quickly.

The trade-offs come with the size. Skis cannot be clicked on at the front door, the pool is built for a dip rather than for lengths, and there are few lounges to retreat to on a snowy afternoon. Twenty-one rooms also fill fast in the holidays, and the Tibetan touches, in a village of Savoyard baroque, will not be to every taste.

As for the dog, the barrel never existed. The real hospice dogs carried nothing; the brandy was painted on by Edwin Landseer, an English teenager, in 1820. At Le K2 Chogori the legend has been put right. The brandy waits at the bar, the rescue party is a family, and of all the Bernards in this story, the only one who never shows up is the dog.