This chalet is only available to guests booking the whole chalet for sole use.
Chalet Charlotte, Val D'Isere
There are five reasons for booking Chalet Charlotte.
First, its position. It is on the edge of the old village, a short walk past the lady and dog from the church, 50m from the nursery slopes. You can almost ski to the door.
Secondly, the interior: like Jonah’s whale, it is a great deal roomier and more comfortable than one would imagine from the exterior. It has a very pleasant sitting-dining room with a high ceiling, open-plan kitchen, a balcony with a good view up Bellevarde, and a big, solid fireplace built of stones collected by the owner for the colours of their lichen.
On the same floor as the living room are two twin bedrooms. Room 1 has a high ceiling and a french window to the wide sunny terrace. There is a bathroom with both a bath and a shower – very convenient for people inured to seeing each other starkers – and a separate wc.
Upstairs, via a staircase too steep for anyone’s Grannie or toddler (its third USP), are a comfy twin bedroom and a very cosy double. They share a shower-room with wc. These two rooms are tucked under the eaves, and their windows are a stroke of genius: not just the normal skylights, which don’t do a lot under ten feet of snow, but also proper windows opening onto the living room below. These give all the fresh air you want, yet you go to sleep to the scent of the log fire and awake to the smell of fresh coffee.
The fourth reason is what the chalet does not have: WiFi, en-suite bathrooms etc, because as a result it also doesn’t attract the sort of guest who spends his holiday fiddling on his computer or worrying that someone else might have borrowed his toothpaste.
The fifth and perhaps the greatest reason for staying in Chalet Charlotte is that it offers ruinously good value – ruinous to us, not you – and in these days when the pound in your pocket just slipped through a hole in the lining, eating food 50m from the slopes without having to remortgage the castle sounds like a good investment!
Features - Chalet Charlotte, Val D'Isere
- Sweet, surprisingly roomy chalet in a fantastic position, on edge of old village and nursery slopes
- Excellent, high living room with log fire and balcony
- Two bedrooms on lower floor, two more squeezed under roof up staircase too steep for toddlers, tipplers or dodderers
- Good ratio of baths, showers and wcs
- Four minutes’ walk from church and lifts, thirty seconds from slopes
- Bus stops to major lifts nearby
- Two chalet staff, who live out
All of our chalets have excellent hot water, more than adequate heating, CD players, radios, hairdryers, irons and ironing boards, chess, backgammon, Scrabble and cards. Each chalet has a mobile phone for emergency and incoming calls. Guests wishing to use it for outgoing calls can buy credit from the shops. No chalet has a land line. Guests wishing to use the internet need mobile connection or to visit one of the several internet cafes.
Accommodation - Chalet Charlotte, Val D'Isere
4 bedrooms for 8 guests, with 1 bath, 2 showers
- Bedroom 1: Twin (10’8” x 10’3”) on the lower floor, with high ceiling, which makes room feel very spacious, and balcony.
- Bedroom 2: Twin (10’8” x 10’3”) on the lower floor, with same view towards Le Fornet as Bedroom 1.
- Bedroom 3: Twin (10’ x 9’3”) on the upper floor, with a low, fitted cupboard under the eaves (the room is actually 12’9” wide at this point). It has a skylight and an internal window overlooking the sitting-dining room.
- Bedroom 4: Double (9’6” x 7’6”) on the upper floor, with windows like Bedroom 3.
- Bathrooms: One wc and a bathroom (with bath and separate shower) on lower floor, shower-room with wc on upper floor.
- Sitting-Dining Room: (19’ x 12’) plus open-plan kitchen. Wood panelled with high ceiling, balcony, underfloor heating, and sofas around an attractive stone fireplace.
Meals - Chalet Charlotte, Val D'Isere
We start with a proper breakfast. Fruit juice, porridge, Dorset cereals, bacon, eggs, baguettes straight from the famous local bakery, a croissant or pain au chocolat if you like, yogurts, British tea and fresh coffee from Italian espresso pots (with Nescafé and bizarre infusions for those who prefer them). A Cooked Breakfast option is also available.
You return from the slopes to find bread and jam, a freshly-baked cake, hot chocolate etc. left out for you.
Nightly canapés are followed by a three-course, fixed-menu, dinner-party-style meal. The cuisine is largely French, though with a fusion of other influences – what Londoners call Modern British. (Foreign, in other words.) With dinner, we serve free unlimited quantities of a selection of very drinkable French AOC wines and vins de pays.
Please note: The chalet host will have a day off during the course of the week, during which you will be required to eat out.