Hotel La Majun

Find the enoteca in its stone vault before dinner: Carlo Mellauner will happily walk you through the 600-label cellar, and most evenings Roberta and Natalie are there too, sharing their ritual glass of Franciacorta before service begins.

Alta Badia is the civilised corner of the Dolomiti Superski — 130 kilometres of mostly sunny, mostly forgiving pistes linked to the 1,200-kilometre whole — and La Villa is its best-kept village: smaller than Corvara, quieter than San Cassiano, with the Gran Risa delivering the only crowds, once a year, in December. La Majun sits in the middle of it with the ski-school slope across the road. You can judge a ski hotel by its mornings: here they run boot-warm and unhurried, skis stored and passes delivered, the first lift sixty seconds from breakfast.

Inside, the house keeps the grain of the barn it once was. Rooms and suites run wood-warm across the old building and the new wing — cirmolo pine, balconies to Piz Lavarella, the Sella and the Conturines — and the public rooms hang local artists beside the family's black-and-white photographs of the village. The Agana spa is the afternoon's argument: the stone pool curved like a mountain lake under its picture windows, the panoramic sauna, the hay bath, and — best seat in La Villa — the log-fired timber hot tub on the rooftop, candlelit, with a firepit alongside and the white peaks all around.

Evenings begin in the vaulted enoteca among the locals and end at the guests-only table, where the kitchen runs Ladin tradition through a modern hand — mountain ingredients, seasonal and largely local, with the area's quiet confidence about food. In summer the same terrace hosts cooking classes and the valley turns to its trails and passes, with the Puez-Odle wilderness on the doorstep. Winter or summer, the house's real asset is unchanged: a family on the premises, and the settled ease of a place that has been somebody's home for three generations.