WHITE SPACE

White Space - Luxury Travel Magazine

White Space

By: Matthew Brace, Issue 34 - Autumn 2008

(Whitepod - Villars, Switzerland‎)

A DESIGNER IGLOO IN THE SHADOW OF SWISS MOUNTAINS OFFERS THE ULTIMATE LUXURY – PEACE & QUIET.

I was drifting back into consciousness, languidly and reluctantly. My breathing was slow and deep as a well. A slide show of images was playing in one of the back-street cinemas of my brain: a train, a tunnel, heavy bags, a red wristwatch and a large villa on the lakeshore. For the first time in months I had slept through a night without waking. I felt I had slept for a week. What was this nirvana I found myself in? Had I passed over to the other side? Maybe this was that perfect writer’s cell in the sky – a white room with no noise or distraction, a clean canvas. Was this heaven? If it was, then my wife had come with me, for she rolled over and socked me in the jaw with her elbow.

“Did we die?” I asked her.

“I don’t remember,” she said, then whispered, “It’s so quiet. It’s silent outside. Does it snow in heaven?”

When snow fell on the house where I grew up, it was a vast gossamer blanket softening life’s rough and painful edges. It hushed traffic from a roar to a gentle purr. It absorbed the plethora of ambient noises that gang up to assault us.

We began to wake and remember where we were. We opened our eyes. We were lying in a snow-white bed with snow-white sheets, doonas (two of them – Arctic-style) and fluffy sheepskin rugs. We were enveloped in an equally snow-white canvas dome. Beyond the end of the bed, past a pot-bellied stove, a pile of neatly chopped logs and a velveteen armchair, was a half-moon window of clear plastic but, rather than a view, all we saw was more white. A rustling broke the silence somewhere above our heads on the top of the dome – more a sweep than a rustle. It started quietly but grew into a considerable swish as something slid off the dome and knocked the monochrome coating clean off the plastic half-moon window. The dome trembled.

We sat bolt upright in bed and looked out the window over a winter wonderland. In the hours we had slept, deep and snug in our cave halfway up an Alp, snow had been busy falling. Lots of snow. We leapt from the covers, frantically pulling on thermal long johns, T-shirts and several pairs of trousers, and shoving our ski-socked feet into boots. The dome door comprised two zipped canvas flaps that had successfully kept the temperature inside at about five degrees celcius all night long. We tugged them open, flung back the flaps and fell out giggling into the blinding sunlight of this new white land. Two men in very expensive salopettes were skiing intently past our dome, en route to the small private piste nearby. They slowed to stare at us as we stagedived off the dome’s wooden platform and sunk up to our waists in the drifts. We laughed and screeched and threw snowballs at each other and pushed each other’s heads into the drifts.

It had been a decade since either of us had seen snow. A snowmobile made its way up the mountainside towards us.

“Bonjour,” said the driver. “I am Eric. I ’ave brought wood for your fire and some tea.”

We bundled ourselves back into the dome, stripped off our wet clothes and fell on the flasks of tea. The pot-bellied stove was roaring in minutes and our boots steamed contentedly next to it. Our faces were flushed and our eyes glimmered with the prospects of a perfect day ahead. Breakfast, and snowman construction were of paramount importance, followed by snowshoeing up our mountain and along a trail through the forests, then back home to cosy up in our dome under sheepskin blankets in front of the roaring logs.

It is called Whitepod and it is the creation of Sofia de Meyer, a hard-working tourism visionary who grew up just across the valley here in the south-west French-speaking corner of Switzerland. In 15 years of travel writing I have not come across anywhere so sustainable. And Whitepod not only gives the body a fabulous holiday but treats the soul too. Sofia’s childhood sounded perfectly Heidi-esque: running free over the hills and among the Summer edelweiss, tending her father’s chalets and eating chunks of cheese while listening to his stories about the landscape. “He meant everything that matters to me. He taught me patience and respect for nature,” Sofia said as we crunched through the snow one day after breakfast.

Life drew Sofia elsewhere, to London and a job with a city law firm, but she never lost her love for the mountains and a few years ago she arrived at a crossroads. “I was 30 years old and had to decide whether to become a partner in my firm or follow my heart and my passion for nature,” she told us. “I came back here to the valley and spent three days in the forest for inspiration. At the end of those three days my decision was made. I decided I wanted to create something. What was most important was for me to live according to the philosophy I respect most and that means respect for nature.”

Whitepod was born. Now it sports a clutch of geodesic canvas domes or ‘pods’ secured to wooden platforms. Virtually every element of the resort is environmentally sensitive. In summer the hillside is left to the wild flowers and scampering rabbits. So minimal is the imprint the pods leave on the landscape that a passing walker would never know that they had been there through the previous winter. Sofia and her team wait patiently for the first frosts in November and then rush out to bang the wooden stilts of the platforms into the ground.

“This is a good way of ensuring they are securely fixed to the earth, because as the ground freezes it locks the posts in place. And it’s natural – just wood in the earth,” Sofia said. Then up go the pods, complete with wooden floor, big beds, pot-bellied stove, floor rugs, hurricane lamp, torches and armchair. “We do not have any electricity or running water in the pods, which is a deliberate attempt to reduce energy use and pollution.

There is a shared toilet cabin in the middle of the pod area. This is one thing that some guests are concerned about but really it is very good.” Really, it is. When it comes to ablutions, there are few people as fussy as a travel writer. I like my bathrooms big, warm and very private. My partner feared a hissy fit as I returned from my first trip to the Snow Dunny but I came blustering in through the pod flap in a gleeful mood. The Snow Dunny turned out to be a wooden mini-chalet complete with a washbasin and three cubicles, each with a flush toilet. It may not be huge but it is more than adequately warmed by a radiator and is altogether a huge success. By now you’ll be thinking, okay, where exactly do we shower? Well, you have to take a bit of a walk but then this is sustainable tourism, so there is an onus on the guest to do his or her bit.

The walk takes you past big fir trees meringued with inches of snow, down to a large chalet that is the nerve centre of the Whitepod operation. The showers are downstairs, while the top floor is where all meals are served, where activities are organized and where you can take a day off from playing in the snow and curl up in a woolly jumper and thick cosy socks in front of a log fire in the open lounge and read a book, drink wine and doze.

I spent one day doing precisely that and was intrigued by occasional screeches and screams and flurries of snowballs outside. Pulling on my snow boots, I braved the elements and discovered that the downstairs floor of the chalet houses not just the piping-hot showers but an even hotter sauna and a spa area, where a visiting masseur will come and knead your muscles back into shape. The screamers were a couple of frisky Germans taking great delight in running from the sauna through the spa area in their Euro swimwear (bright colours, snug fit) out into the snow and pounding each other with snowballs.

The heating and all the chalet’s electricity is solar-powered, and the water is collected straight off the mountain and at least 95 per cent of the resort’s edible produce comes from within a threehour drive of the pods. This means that each evening you can order Swiss wine (don’t turn your nose up, it’s pretty good) and before supper Sofia will come around the lounge with a plate of delicious cold meats “from a little man just down the valley. He cures them all himself by hand.” Sofia continued, “The only things we have to import are oranges and dried fruit. And because no pesticides are allowed in Swiss farming, everything you eat here is virtually fully organic.” This makes sitting down to Sofia’s famous Swiss raclette and a bottle of Chateau Suisse even more appetising. Despite the fact that the pods have no electricity or running water, they are luxurious and comfortable – two descriptions that are rarely associated with sustainable tourism. I would willingly trade a month of free accommodation in some of the world’s finest five star hotels for a week in one of Sofia’s pods. Judging by her booking sheets I am not the only one. “Last year by mid-November we were completely full for the entire season – right through until March,” she said. “Guests come here and when they leave they do two things. First they rebook for next year, which is good, but they also feel inspired to demand more places like Whitepod from their travel agents and from the travel industry.”

Sofia may not have started the sustainable-tourism movement but she can be credited as a pioneer in making it economically viable. She has helped to set a new benchmark for travel and it is one that I am sure will be replicated all over the world. Enjoying this real travel experience with me was an equally real mix of tourists. The Germans wanted a fairy-tale anniversary holiday in the snow – and the sauna. An Italian couple wanted to go on a dogsled run, which they did as soon as the husky truck showed up and the yelping snapping scramble of dogs was finally pulled into line and harnessed. Off they sped, between the pods and over the brow of the hillside, dressed in skin-tight, luminous, mouthwash-green trousers – the Italians, not the dogs. We latched on to two lively barristers, Ian and Polly, from London and spent our supper times singing Whitepod’s praises in between mouthfuls of fondue.

One afternoon I found Ian in the lounge, deep in a book. ‘Where’s Polly?’ I asked. ‘There,’ he said, pointing through the window at his wife, who was paragliding across the valley. What all the guests told me was that the Whitepod experience had changed them. This had not just been a holiday; it had been a meaningful pause in life. They had luxuriated, eaten great food, drunk wine, skied, sled and parachuted, and all the while learning about the pressures on the environment and how easy it is to reduce them while still having a jolly good time. “I call up my secretary in Rome yesterday,” one of the green-trousered Italians told me as they were checking out, “and told her to buy the panel solar for my company’s office. No delay. Tomorrow? No. Do it today.” If everyone who stayed at Whitepod called their secretaries to buy the ‘panel solar’ for their offices and homes, then Sofia de Meyer could be halfway to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in Europe.

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