The next time you are enjoying your chalet holidays, take a moment to consider the origins of these buildings which are nowadays seen as luxurious. Many of the decorative features which you will find on chalets, and which make them so attractive to look at, where originally installed out of practicality rather than decoration. Chalets were nothing more than mountain farm houses where ordinary familes lived and worked.

In those days, farmers would often own two or three chalets which were situated along the migration routes used when cattle were brought down from the high mountains for the winter. The ski chalets we enjoy today were originally designed as nothing more than places to stay as the cattle were taken down to the valley below. It must have been a tough life for everyone involved, and one can imagine that if you were to have told the farmer from that one day tens of thousands of people would visit the mountains for fun, he would have thought you were mad! So, from those humble origins we now have the modern chalets, which are used by those who come to the mountains for ski holidays or other forms of outdoor fun.

Chalet holidays give you the chance to be close to nature, while enjoying the comforts of modern life, something which those old mountain farmers would have scoffed at, But don’t let that put you off making the most of the ski chalets available. If those old farmers had had the chance, they would have loved to spend time in the luxurious ski chalets of today!