A fully staffed chalet is the standard at this level, and almost nobody explains what it actually involves. Four to six people work in a house you are living in, on a rhythm set by the mountain. Here is who they are and what each one does.
The team
A chalet of six or seven bedrooms sleeping fourteen normally runs on four to six people, with clearly divided roles rather than one person doing everything.
- Chalet manager — runs the house and is your single point of contact. Handles the schedule, the requests, and anything that goes wrong before you hear about it.
- Chef — breakfast, afternoon tea and dinner, menus agreed in advance and adjusted through the week.
- Host — service at table, the fire, the bar, and the hundred small things between meals.
- Housekeeping — daily, done while you are on the mountain rather than around you.
- Driver — where the chalet is not ski-in / ski-out, or for evenings in resort.
The shape of a day
Breakfast is served to each guest’s hour rather than in one sitting, because nobody in a party of fourteen wakes at the same time. The house is cleaned while you ski, so you return to a room that has been reset rather than one being worked on.
Afternoon tea on return is not a formality. A group that comes in famished at half past four and dines at eight needs something substantial in between, and a chef who has done winter seasons builds the day around that rather than treating it as an English affectation.
Dinner is three or four courses with wines, served by the host. It is the fixed point of the day, and in most chalets it runs later than people expect once the children are down.
The day off, and why it should be named upfront
Almost every staffed chalet has one staff day off a week, usually mid-week, on which dinner is not served. This is entirely normal and entirely reasonable, and it is also the single most common surprise on a first chalet booking.
It should be named at the point of booking rather than discovered in the kitchen on the Wednesday. We state it, and we book the restaurant for that evening at the same time as the chalet, because in a festive week the tables go early.
Four chalets, each one visited.
Privacy, which is the real question
The concern people raise before their first staffed chalet is always the same: will there be strangers in the house all week. The honest answer is that good staff are close to invisible.
They work while you are out and step back when you are in the room. They anticipate rather than ask. The measure of a team is how rarely you notice it, and a chalet manager worth the name understands that a family wants its evening to itself.
Where staff live in, it is in separate quarters with their own entrance. Where you would rather the house were empty after dinner, that can be arranged, and it is worth saying so early rather than halfway through the week.
What it is not
A staffed chalet is not a hotel with a nicer view. There is no reception, no room service menu and no anonymity: you will know these people by Tuesday, and that is the point of it.
It is also not included in the rate. The chalet price covers the rental of the property and only that; the chef and the household team are quoted alongside it, with the passes, the equipment and the transfers, in one figure before anything is committed. The reasoning is in what a luxury chalet actually costs.
Getting the team right
The variables worth stating before the week are fewer than people think: how many children and their ages, dietary requirements, whether you want an early children’s table, and what time you like to eat. Everything else adjusts on the ground.
The chef is the role where experience shows most, and where a mountain season makes a visible difference. Instructors, nannies and the rest of the week are arranged by our winter concierge desk before you arrive.