The Swiss alpine institution reopens for winter 2026 with a complete interior overhaul by the Paris design master.
Four Seasons Gstaad is coming back. After a full closure for renovation, the legendary Bernese Oberland resort will welcome guests again when the 2026-27 ski season opens, armed with interiors by Joseph Dirand, the French designer known for stripping luxury down to its architectural bones.
Dirand’s approach to the property sits somewhere between reverence and reinvention. He’s not erasing Gstaad’s identity as one of skiing’s most refined addresses, but he’s not sentimentalizing it either. Instead, he’s applying the same design discipline that made his name at properties like the Experimental Group hotels and private residences across Paris and beyond: clean geometries, restrained material palettes, and a refusal to let decoration overwhelm space. For a hotel built on understated glamour, that’s a natural fit.
What makes this particular redesign notable isn’t the roster of Michelin stars in the dining program or the square footage of the spa, though those exist. It’s how Dirand is treating the relationship between interior and landscape. Gstaad’s real luxury has always been the view, and Dirand’s work typically emphasizes transparency and sight lines over sculptural furnishings. At a mountain hotel, that principle becomes almost urgent: the Alps deserve the largest possible portion of your visual field. Everything else is secondary.
The property will retain its position as a gathering point for old-money European skiers and the kind of guests who book suites without checking rates, but the language of those interiors will feel sharper and less hotel-generic than before. In Dirand’s hands, Gstaad gets a design philosophy rather than a refresh.
