Roderick Easdale heads up into the French Alps at Megeve to enjoy golf with a view and an indulgent new hotel and spa
Golf In The French Alps At Mont d’Arbois
I am a few holes in to my round at the Mont d’Arbois golf course in Megeve in the French Alps – an hour and a half’s drive from Geneva and about four minutes from the Four Seasons Megeve Hotel – and I’m enjoying myself.
My drives are flying further than usual.
I am not sure whether to put this down to my increased golfing genius, or the excellence of the TaylorMade M4 hire set the club has provided for me.
Turns out this is due to the invigorating Alpine air – literally.
Golf balls travel ten per cent further at this altitude.
A quick bit of calculation shows that I am striking the ball just as poorly as ever.
Still, the illusion is beguiling.
So too are the views from the course.
The layout itself is fairly flat and trots back and forth sideways across a gentle piece of hillside – for this reason, slicers are in often in luck as huge slices tend merely to leave one fairway to nestle safely on a parallel one.
Two variations from this theme are the 1st, a short par 4, which rises slightly and doglegs to the left with a line of trees splitting the fairway into two, and the par-5 17th, the longest hole, which descends and double doglegs, although the second one is but mild – a ‘pup-leg’?
This is an easy-walking course, so there is no need to take a buggy, nor one of the cable cars.
Cable cars cross at either end of the course, for in winter parts of the layout are a ski run.
The Mont d’Arbois golf season is from about mid-May through to October.
An Alpine Welcome
A local rule is that any shot striking a cable has to be replayed.
Nor are shots allowed to be played when the cars are running – which is for around a minute every 20 minutes in the golfing season.
The Mont d’Arbois golf clubhouse restaurant was welcomingly busy the Saturday we played, with excellent grub and relaxed, attentive, prompt service.
The course also has a driving range, a practice putting green and a well-stocked pro shop.
The club is a short drive – or maybe at this altitude only a long iron – from the Four Seasons Megeve, a 55-room hotel.
It, too, has suffered length inflation for it is in fact a two-season hotel: winter and summer.
The summer season runs from mid-June to late September and both the hotel and golf course are owned by the Rothschild family.
The hotel is decorated with art from Baroness Rothschild’s own collection.
The hotel opened in December last year. The golf course, a Henry Cotton design, dates from 1964, although golf, in the form of a four-hole track long since gone, first came to the town in 1920.
The hotel’s helicopter can take you to golf courses in Chamonix, Evian and Crans-Montana, or fly fishing in the Alpine lakes.
Much To Do
The Four Season Hotel, Megeve
In winter, hotel guests have winter sports to occupy themselves with outdoors; in summer, guides can take you up into the mountains by foot, electric mountain bike or horse.
There are three restaurants here, including a Japanese one and one where the two-Michelin-starred chef, Julien Gatillon, reigns supreme.
He also runs a haute cuisine cookery class at the hotel.
We were served a detox lunch around the pool, which appealed to us, not least because this version of detoxing involved both chips and wine.
Wine is taken seriously here.
The cellar has 1,200 different wines, some from the Rothschilds’ own collection, ranging in price from €45 to €21,000 a bottle.
Facilities at the hotel include a kids’ room, with was endowed with a generous selection of toys, many of them fluffy, and a Teen Zone.
The latter was popular with guests of all ages – indeed I only ever saw one actual teenager in there – as it is essentially an amusement arcade, although there are some computers tucked away for those of a more studious bent.
The hotel’s spa at 900m2 is apparently the largest in the Alps, and there is an instructor with whom you can book individual yoga or woga lessons.
He will also take you for a wiatsu session, in which floats are attached to your arms and legs and you float around the pool, held up by the instructor who manipulates your body into various poses.
It proved gloriously relaxing.
Woga is water yoga, done in the heated pool, and I have to say that it is rather fun.
The water helps with balance when less-supple-than-they-were bodies try to do supple things.
After enjoying the drive-lengthening properties of the Alpine air, this was a trip where I could briefly pretend that I was young and athletic again – which made an already enjoyable stay even more enjoyable.
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