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The Arula Chalets

High above the village of Lech, in the exclusive Oberlech area, the Arula Chalets have long offered a rare combination: the privacy of a mountain retreat with the polish of a five-star hotel. This summer, following an extensive renovation focused on longevity and holistic well-being, that promise has a new center of gravity – a wellness sanctuary that now anchors the entire property.

The journey there is part of the escape. Arriving from Zurich, Innsbruck or Munich, the final stretch unfolds through dramatic alpine scenery and switchback roads. In winter, guests drive straight into an underground garage and step from car to chalet without touching the snow outside; in summer, the same entrance opens onto hiking trails and quiet mountain paths.

Arula Chalet 1

Comprising two private residences that together sleep up to 30 guests, the property manages to feel both expansive and intimate. A dedicated team – butlers, chefs, chauffeurs, concierges, wellness specialists – anticipates every need while leaving guests free to set their own pace.

Arula Chalet 1, the larger of the two, sleeps up to 22 and is built for shared moments: floor-to-ceiling windows framing uninterrupted views of the peaks, long dinners, evenings by the fire, a private bar, cards and darts.
Next door, Arula Chalet 2 holds a more intimate scale for groups of up to eight. Across both, the design leans into warm woods and stone textures rather than ornament – contemporary alpine style that feels grounded more than showy.

Arula Chalet 1

Arula Chalet 1

The chalets first welcomed guests in December 2018, and modern conveniences (Sonos throughout, a private cinema, in-room voice assistants) keep the property connected without breaking the sense of remove. But the real story this year is downstairs, where the lower floors of Chalet 1 have been rebuilt into a wellness sanctuary pairing traditional rituals with more clinical, performance-driven therapies.

The morning begins with an osteopathic massage – targeted, restorative work that leaves the body loose and the mind, gradually, following suit. From there, the newly built sound healing room takes over: a cream-and-beige space acoustically sealed off from the outside world, where no two sessions of therapeutic frequency and vibration play out quite the same way.

Arula Chalet 1. Massage room

Arula Chalet 1. Sound Healing Room

Outdoors, mornings move at a different tempo. A Qigong session on the terrace, timed to the first light hitting the peaks, pairs gentle movement with breathwork in a way that feels less like exercise and more like syncing up with the landscape. Those who’d rather start the day alone can instead take the newly restored 14-metre indoor pool, its relaxation couches positioned for uninterrupted quiet.

Recovery here takes several forms. Halotherapy fills a room with fine salt particles said to support skin and respiratory health; ceramic loungers use infrared heat to encourage circulation; and a flotation bed fitted with water jets and light therapy produces something close to weightlessness. It’s the kind of treatment that asks nothing of you beyond letting go.

Arula Chalet 1. Indoor Pool

For guests chasing something more clinical, the property’s newest additions go further. A hyperbaric chamber offers pressurised oxygen sessions from 20 minutes to two hours, with dual seating for those who’d rather do it together, while a cryotherapy chamber and a traditional cold plunge pool (the latter, notably, the original inspiration for Arula’s entire longevity concept) deliver a sharper kind of reset.

An exclusive partnership with skincare brand Augustinus Bader rounds out the beauty side of the program, alongside an upgraded fitness centre.

Arula Chalet 1. Cryo-chamber and Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber

Arula Chalet 1. Fitness Centre

The philosophy extends past the treatment rooms and into the glass. ‘Longevity Through the Glass’, the property’s alcohol-free drinks programme, swaps out the usual wine list for de-alcoholised sparkling wines, fruit-forward creations, and a botanical sparkling tea – proof that cutting alcohol doesn’t mean cutting indulgence. The cocktail list follows suit, built around alcohol-free spirits and house-made kombucha rather than anything harder.

Food, meanwhile, stays central to the experience. Head Chef Viola Köngeter moves fluidly between Austrian tradition and contemporary international plates, whether the format is a tasting menu, à la carte, or a long family-style table built for conversation.

Arula Chalet 1. Bar

Arula Chalet 1

The mountains themselves round out the program: sunrise yoga on the terrace, a guided walk through native alpine plants that later becomes a personalised herbal tea – small rituals that tie the wellness concept back to the landscape it’s built into.

Did we leave restored? Without question. But what stays with you isn’t any single treatment or the sweep of the view; it’s the way the whole stay is engineered around unhurried time. No treatment here felt rushed, no schedule felt imposed. That, more than any single amenity, is what The Arula Chalets is actually selling: permission to slow down completely, in a setting built to make that feel effortless.
 
Discover more about The Arula Chalets here

photography. courtesy of The Arula Chalets
words. Clara La Rosa

Nikol (Nickey) Vyhlidalova.

Getting to Zermatt, Switzerland, requires a level of commitment that most alpine destinations simply do not demand. Because the village is completely car-free, the final leg of the journey relies on a cog railway that climbs from Täsch through the valley, bringing travellers into an alpine sanctuary that feels entirely removed from the frantic pace of the modern world. By the time CERVO Mountain Resort appears above the village centre – all dark timber, natural stone and unobstructed Matterhorn views – the journey has already initiated the decompression process, allowing guests to leave the noise of everyday life behind.

Schön! alive arrived for the inaugural ALTO Retreat, CERVO’s new three-day trail running programme, ahead of its official launch on 26th June. ALTO, the resort’s newly launched movement and performance initiative, is designed for what its founders describe as a more considered way of engaging with landscape, body and mind. In practice, it means breathwork at altitude, cold plunge pools, a 15km mountain trail before most people have fully woken up, and the unmistakable realisation that your relationship with your own body deserves more attention than you have been giving it.

Nikol (Nickey) Vyhlidalova.

Nikol (Nickey) Vyhlidalova.

The programme is led by Martin Anthamatten, a former Swiss national ski mountaineering team member and record-setting winner of the Zermatt-Rothorn race. Anthamatten is the kind of guide who makes covering enormous distances across steep terrain feel like an entirely reasonable thing to do – beginners will have some trust issues afterwards, but that’s part of the experience. His philosophy is about understanding what the body is actually communicating. “It’s important to feel when you’re in a block; you have to feel the body sensations,” he says. “Sleep is the most important. I think it’s better to recover a bit more than less.” For someone who has spent a career at the sharp end of alpine endurance sport, the emphasis on recovery over output is both surprising and immediately convincing.

The retreat begins before the trail does, with morning breathwork sessions carried out by the specialised team at Keen Wellbeing. These controlled breathing techniques are engineered to prepare the body for contrast therapy, which moves systematically between hot steam and freezing ice baths. Drawing on both Eastern and Nordic traditions at the Ātman Mountain Spa, this contrast routine delivers intense mental clarity and reduces systemic inflammation before runners even lace up their shoes. The ice is cold in the way that ice is cold, naturally, so there is no getting used to it. But the after-effect, that particular clarity that arrives about three minutes after climbing out, the one that makes everything else seem manageable, is difficult to argue with.

CERVO, Ritual Room and Ātman Mountain Spa.

CERVO Resort.

The trail run itself is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Fifteen kilometres from the resort, up through the mountain terrain and across to Sunnega, then along the ridge and around Lake Leisee, with the Matterhorn appearing and reappearing at intervals throughout, its peak dusted with a thin layer of snow that made the whole thing look like someone had touched it up with a paintbrush for the occasion. Coach Florent Tillie – patient beyond all reasonable expectation – ensured that nobody was left behind, a task that required considerable diplomatic skill at various points during the ascent. The terrain shifts quickly in this part of Switzerland, from well-maintained paths to rocky switchbacks to open meadow, and the trail demands constant attention. What it gives back though – apart from muscular pain – is a perspective that is very difficult to achieve at sea level.

Sunnega, reached by an underground funicular from the village, sits at around 2,300 metres and looks directly at the Matterhorn across a valley that has the quality of something constructed. Lake Leisee, a high-altitude lake above it, is small and still and surrounded by Alpine flowers in June. Running past it feels slightly absurd, especially considering how much easier it would be to travel across the mountain that way.

Nikol (Nickey) Vyhlidalova.

CERVO, Madre Nostra.

Nutrition and hydration are managed in partnership with Swiss performance brand PEAQ Hydration, with custom, nutrient-dense menus served across CERVO’s three regional restaurants: ‘Ferdinand,’ ‘Madre Nostra’ and ‘Bazaar’. Each is based on regional produce, although the menus offer three distinct culinary experiences – from Thai-based dishes to classic Italian-style favourites.

CERVO itself is worth discussing beyond its role as a retreat venue. The resort’s 54 rooms and suites across three lodges, designed by German design studio Dreimeta, operate as a clustered village of seven distinct chalets. Nomad pairs rugged industrial accents with mid-century utility styling for the modern explorer; Alpinist leans into a minimalist, Nordic-inspired interpretation of high-altitude refuge; and Huntsman references classic alpine lodge heritage with deep leathers, rich wools and private open fireplaces. The interior architecture is grounded heavily in sustainably sourced local larch wood, raw concrete and textured granite, paired with customised details like integrated record players and private saunas that make the spaces feel instantly warm and lived-in.

CERVO, Bazaar.

CERVO, Alpinist Room.

For those who want the full three-day version, the retreat is structured around five pillars: performance and technique, recovery and regeneration, nutrition and hydration, mindfulness, and community. The last one is the easiest to underestimate and the hardest to replicate outside of a context like this, a small group of people doing something physically demanding together in a landscape that puts individual effort into immediate and humbling perspective.

The ALTO Trail Club and Lab, which launched weekly from 10th June, extends the same philosophy to a broader audience, open to beginners and experienced runners alike, with Anthamatten and the ALTO team leading guided runs against that same Matterhorn backdrop. The second ALTO Retreat will follow in September. 

Discover more about the ALTO Trail Club and Lab here.

photography. courtesy of CERVO, Nikol (Nickey) Vyhlidalova
words. Gennaro Costanzo

ORA.

On La Baule’s Atlantic bay, the century-old L’Hermitage Barrière has opened ORA, a longevity destination that swaps the biohacking grind for something far rarer: wellbeing you actually want.

Most longevity retreats sell discipline – cold plunges at dawn, spreadsheets of biomarkers, a faint suggestion that pleasure is the enemy. ORA, the new longevity bay wrapped around Barrière’s L’Hermitage in La Baule, lets the place do all the persuading. The sea, the pines and the shimmering light on the water create a scene so beautiful it makes even the simplest lunch taste like a gourmet meal. Schön! spent four days on the Côte d’Amour to test a single claim: that the body’s better instincts can be coaxed rather than commanded (spoiler: they can).

L’Hermitage has stood over the bay since 1926. Neo-Norman, white and timbered, the palace is a 100-year-old building that seems poured from the sea itself. Across 200 rooms, 18 suites and six floors, the palace has been home to the likes of Churchill, Aga Khan and Onassis. In 2025, it slipped into the ‘Leading Hotels of the World’ collection, which surprised nobody who had stood in its lobby beneath that vertiginous ceiling and watched the Atlantic fill every window. La Baule itself is the real draw, though. Nine kilometres of fine sand, pines that scent the whole town, a bay regularly ranked among the world’s most beautiful, and for once, the brochures undersell it. This is the Côte d’Amour, the Atlantic Riviera, and it has been prescribing sea air as medicine since the 1890s.

ORA.

ORA.

The dining area, Ciro’s La Baule, sits right on the beach, standing as a yacht-club fantasy in varnished wood and brass by Friedmann & Versace, where Chef Yannick Hochet sends out langoustines, lobster linguine and a now-notorious bucket of warm madeleines. Meanwhile, Le Pavillon is a winter garden built around a lemon tree. Plenty of people behave appallingly here, but ORA gives you a reason not to, without making it feel like a loss.

ORA, “The Longevity Bay,” is Barrière’s new health and prevention centre, threaded through the resort and its sister hotel, Le Royal. In 1896, cardiologist Yves Tréguer established the Institut Verneuil here to investigate the effects of seawater and sea air on the body. His findings were so convincing that Monaco commissioned him to design the Thermes Marins de Monte-Carlo. The ORA bloodline is being brought into the present day with a laboratory’s worth of equipment, coordinating physician Dr Grard and dietitian Stéphanie Janvier Michel to manage it. The method rests on six pillars, from medical assessment and marine vitality to nutrition, regeneration, mobility and a serious focus on mind and cognition.

And they find a great deal. A stay opens with assessments, and this is where ORA earns the word longevity instead of borrowing it. Laboratoire Bioavenir reads more than 220 biological markers across oxidative stress, silent inflammation, hormones, microbiota and cardiovascular risk. An OligoScan scans the palm for minerals, trace elements and heavy-metal load, catching shortfalls and overloads long before a standard blood panel would notice. A Lunar iDXA maps bone density and body composition down to visceral fat. Most unnerving of all, an Age Reader scans the forearm for the glycation end-products your body hoards from ultra-processed food, then returns a “physical age” and a fast read on cardiovascular risk. Add an ECG, spirometry, skin diagnostics and a head-to-toe consultation with an emergency-trained physician, and you have a portrait of yourself you cannot argue with. None of it constitutes a diagnosis; it’s simply early warning, which is precisely the point.

ORA.

ORA.

The doctors are scrupulous about that distinction – this is prevention, not medicine, and the difference truly matters. A tissue scan flags a micronutrient gap or a metal overload while it is still only a number, not yet a symptom, so you leave with a map of where you are heading and the time to change the route. The toolkit behind it is no gimmick either: a hyperbaric chamber drives oxygen into the blood under pressure, useful for fatigue, recovery and jet lag, and firmly off-limits if you have certain lung conditions, are pregnant or claustrophobic. Whole-body cryotherapy delivers a few bracing, faintly ridiculous minutes; while PSiO light-and-sound sessions nudge brain rhythms towards calm and better sleep. Then comes the older magic: remineralising seawater baths, hydromassage and the Vital’Mer wrap, which packs you in Guérande salt brine under infrared warmth until something in the nervous system finally surrenders.

What distinguishes ORA from the longevity circus is its inversion of conventional wisdom. Most longevity research relies on friction, demanding you override your instincts and endure hardship like cold hunger and sheer willpower to achieve a longer life. ORA’s, however, creates a pleasant environment where prioritising health becomes effortless. You stroll along the beach simply because it’s there and the light is extraordinary. You eat well at the Yachting restaurant, where they serve delicious cell-first, alcohol-free, plant-based food. It’s so good you can easily slip in straight from a treatment in a bathrobe. The sea, the wraps and the dimmed light sessions have gently dismantled the day. No one’s watching you. The mind stops resisting and starts leaning in, and that is the whole trick, harder to pull off than any ice bath.

ORA.

ORA.

The team clearly knows it. A behavioural and mental-health strand runs alongside the medicine, lining up what you want with what is realistic, so the changes might actually outlast the holiday. Longevity, in the end, is not a week – it’s the ten thousand small choices after the week and a place that makes those choices feel like pleasure has solved the part nearly everyone else fumbles. You do not leave ORA reformed by discipline, but faintly rearranged, holding a folder of numbers and a sharper sense of your own machinery, strangely unwilling to undo any of it. 

A century on, La Baule still writes the same prescription: salt, light, air and a measure of science. It still works. Better still, you find you want to take it.

ORA.

Discover more here.

photography. courtesy of L’Hermitage Barrière
words. Raoul Keil