Les Suites – Maison Bouvier, Tignes

The real Tignes lies at the bottom of a lake. In 1952, after years of protest, with villagers lying down in front of the lorries, the floodgates of the Chevril dam closed and the old village slowly disappeared under the water. Its church bells were melted down, and of eighty-seven families only fifteen stayed. What rose instead, higher up at 2,100 metres, was a resort built from scratch, tall block by tall block.

Tignes makes no apology for any of this. It is the most industrial-feeling of the big French resorts, and nobody comes for the architecture. They come because it is high enough to be almost absurdly snow-sure. Which is exactly why Maison Bouvier feels like such a find: not a brand or a showpiece, but a family that has fallen in love with a concrete resort and set about giving it a heart. A stay here is best read from the top down.

At 3,032 metres, at the top of the Grande Motte glacier, sits the Panoramic. Most skiers eat in its big main room. The ones in the know slip into a small side room, La Table du Panoramic, where the father, Jean-Michel Bouvier, long one of Savoie's most admired chefs, cooks à la carte for a handful of tables. Lunch here is eaten in slippers, boots left at the door, with the Vanoise glaciers in the window, followed by one very long run back down towards the valley.

At 2,100 metres waits the house. From the street it is one more building in Val Claret, but inside the concrete has been wrapped in stone and old wood, the fire in the Whitney Bar is already lit, and someone called Bouvier is usually close by. Catherine Bouvier designed each of the twenty-four suites herself, and a stay here is closer to being the house guest of a family that happens to be obsessed with doing things properly.

Then comes the one thing Tignes could never grow: a forest. The resort sits above the treeline, so at Ursus, named after the brown bear, the son, Clément, built one indoors, with slim fir trunks parting the tables into clearings under a canopy of painted leaves. He cooks only what mountains and lakes can give, wild fish, game, foraged herbs and Alpine cheese, and on a simpler night his sister Emma's La Table de Jeanne, named after the family's great-grandmother, keeps things homely.

None of this changes the view. Val Claret is Val Claret, and from many windows the scenery includes as much concrete as snow. The resort is lively rather than peaceful, the lifts are a short walk away, and anyone hoping for a pretty Savoyard village will have to look under the lake.

That is where the descent ends. For years the dam was drained every decade or so, and the ruins of old Tignes would surface for a few weeks before the water returned. Underwater robots inspect it now, so the village will never come up again. It hardly needs to. A little further up the mountain, in a block in Val Claret, a family has brought its spirit back to the surface.