ST MORITZ is never easy to get to, unless you have a private plane. Often described as the world's most famous resort, it is perched in Switzerland's high Engadine valley on the edge of a lake near the Italian border, surrounded by some of tallest peaks in Europe. From Zurich it's a four hour drive (six hours by train) but from Milan it's a little easier. Its inaccessibility partly accounts for its attraction.
'Come a few days earlier and bring your wife so you can spend the weekend with us in St Moritz,' my friend Alastair Guggenbuhl had said on the phone when I told him I would be visiting Zurich. 'We have a house nearby which will be empty.' So we flew to Zurich to meet Mr Guggenbuhl and his wife, Yonca, then drove for about two hours as far as Chur (pronounced 'cur'). From Chur we took the last train on the two-hour trip to St Moritz, because all the road passes were blocked with heavy snowfalls and threatened by avalanches.
Stepping on to the station platform at the village of Celerina (which lies at the foot of the Cresta and Bobsleigh Runs just a couple of kilometres from St Moritz), our shoes, ankles and shins promptly disappeared into soft, luminous whiteness. It was dark, still snowing and intensely quiet, except for the crunch of our footsteps.
Alastair had not told us much about the house. But he was carrying a bunch of enormous, old-fashioned keys which indicated that it would not be some modern apartment. A chalet, perhaps, a small village cottage? We slipped and lurched through the snow towards the building, bags swinging from all shoulders. Then, illuminated by a street light, I saw an enormous mural on the high back wall of the house, showing the animals entering Noah's Ark.
With a jangle of the heavy keys, Alastair scraped open the back door. Dim lights were switched on. We stumbled inside, brushing snow from our clothes and bags. I don't recall ever being so surprised on entering anybody's house for the first time. Long dark corridors, flagstone floors, wood panelled walls, painted frescoes, masses of bedrooms - we had a choice of seven since nobody else was staying in the house that night - a games room, a huge dry cellar where the cattle used to live and a bathroom with a massive iron door which many years ago had been used as a security room for storing valuables.
The most extraordinary thing about this enormous, empty house was that it looked as if it had been unchanged for about 100 years. We had entered a fairytale and half expected to find Sleeping Beauty lying on an ancient four-poster bed. We went to sleep tothe sound of wooden panels creaking like the tread of ghosts on the stairs.