Chalet Valmalenco, Valtellina

Chalet Valmalenco stands in Torre di Santa Maria, a village built onto the steep eastern side of the Valmalenco above Sondrio. This is not a place where you look at the mountains from a hotel window: you live right in the middle of them. Forest and meadows reach up to the house, the view runs straight up the valley to the glaciers of the Bernina, and the first walk starts at the front door.

We built the house new, from the ground up, and finished it the way we would want to arrive somewhere ourselves, which mostly meant spending the money on the things you actually touch.

The valley behind it runs north into the Bernina. At its head stands Pizzo Bernina, 4,049 metres, the only four-thousand-metre peak in the Eastern Alps, with the Scerscen and Fellaria glaciers spilling off it. This is a genuinely wild valley, and the mountains at the end of it are serious ones. You wake up to them, you spend the day in them, and you end the evening in the sauna looking at them.

The chalet

Eight people across two bedrooms, four beds and one bathroom, with an open living floor around a fireplace and a kitchen built for cooking for a group rather than for show: full-size oven, dishwasher, good knives, and enough plates, glasses and pots that nobody has to count. Outside there is space to sit, and a bench that used to be a chairlift.

The wood-fired private sauna is the reason people come back. It faces up the valley through a full glass front, so you sit in it looking straight at the peaks, and step out onto the terrace afterwards into cold mountain air. In winter that view is white all the way to the horizon; in June it is green below and still white above.

Winter

The Alpe Palù ski area above Chiesa in Valmalenco is five minutes up the road: long red runs through larch forest, a cable car straight out of the village, and lift queues that barely exist. It is a valley people ski rather than a resort people are seen at.

Ski touring is what the Valmalenco is really known for in winter. The Bernina group is one of the great ski-mountaineering regions of the Alps, and the huts at its edge (Marinelli, Bosio, Longoni) are the starting points for routes that people plan their year around. There are cross-country tracks at Chiesa and Lanzada, and snowshoe trails from almost every hamlet on the valley side.

Summer

The Sentiero Rusca runs the length of the valley from Sondrio up to Chiareggio, and the Alta Via della Valmalenco circles the whole valley in eight hut-to-hut stages. The glaciological trail at Alpe Ventina walks you to the edge of the Ventina glacier past markers showing where the ice stood in each decade. It is a short, easy walk with a point to it, and probably the most quietly sobering hour you will spend here.

Lower down, in the main Valtellina, the terraced vineyards above Sondrio grow Nebbiolo under names like Sassella, Grumello and Inferno, and the Sentiero Valtellina cycle path follows the Adda along the valley floor for a hundred flat kilometres. Pizzoccheri, bresaola and a bottle from one of those terraces make an easy last evening.

Good to know

• Parking at the chalet
• Wifi, bed linen and towels included
• Check-in from 16:00, check-out by 10:00
• No pets, unfortunately

Sondrio, twenty minutes down the valley, has a station on the Milan line, so the chalet is reachable without a car if you want it to be, though the valley itself is easier with one.