St Moritz has a certain spirit that can be hard to pin down. A particular humour, an appreciation of the finer things, but perhaps above all an elegantly madcap eccentricity. This is a place of moonlight ice-skating and Cresta Run sledding; of cricket, polo and skijoring behind galloping horses on the frozen St Moritzersee.
Silliness anywhere else, perhaps, but somehow civilised here. While outsiders tend to play up the cocktails and couture, locals and long-timers emphasise the sporty fun along the Engadin Valley, for which St Moritz is often a shorthand. Sources of pride include the magic light, the sunny Champagne climate and ancient stone villages in the high Engadin, which runs from Italy almost to Austria, its rare beauty immortalised between the wars by photographer Albert Steiner, the Swiss answer to Ansel Adams.
When the Cresta Club launched in , membership was based on being a certain sort of man, able not only to descend the Cresta Run in one piece, but to do so having imbibed at least one beef-broth Bull Shot cocktail, and with sense of humour intact.
While Hitchcock visited often but never skied, and Coco Chanel liked to sashay across the Palace lobby in a turban, the quintessential St Moritz characters have tended to be old-money action men. Think Billy Fiske, the American bobsled champion and Aspen ski resort founder, who literally swung from the chandeliers at the Palace bar before he perished flying in the Battle of Britain. Sachs and Bischofberger were founding members of the infamous Dracula Club, opened in , named after their night-time bob races and epitomising the virile elan that twice drew Bond producers to the Engadin.
As a new Assouline book celebrates the resort, some longtime insiders share what the valley means to them. And tell us why that singular St Moritz spirit is still very much alive. When in town, he lives in the main building of the Olympic Stadium. Gstaad is about cocktailing, whereas St Moritz has always drawn eccentrics with a certain soul: sporty, humorous, elegant. It is a place you can escape real life, and be a bit childish. My father used to say that being in St Moritz was like being on a cruise ship, cruising through winter.
