Canada’s Chateau With the Friendly Face : Whistler Luxury Hotel Turns Casual and Affordable During the Summer Season

Some luxury hotels are like a wealthy, elderly aunt who reeks of old money and peers down at strangers from her lobbies and halls with a slightly reproving stare. She’s elegant and formal, all marble and dark wood, but stiff as starch.

Other posh hostelries almost shout new money. The inch-thick carpet is so plush that it doesn’t seem real. And you just know that the floral arrangement set like some giant sculpture in the main hall is worth two of your house payments.

Neither is the case with Chateau Whistler. This exclusive luxury hotel, built for $72 million and which opened in the fall of 1989 in a trendy ski resort in a British Columbia coastal mountain range, certainly looks like a haven for the tony ski set.

The 343-room complex--with its stone pillars, fortresslike cement facade and 12-story towers--is a rambling modern version of a French chateau, but built for 1990s royalty--the rich and famous. The chateau that celebrity chronicler Robin Leach crowned the No. 1 North American ski resort hotel in his “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, World’s Best Guide 1992” boasts two ballrooms, a health club, indoor-outdoor pool and two restaurants, and is decorated with antiques and specially commissioned folk art. In winter, guests can ski from Blackcomb Mountain right up to the hotel, where they hand their equipment over to a valet, who will also put their boots on a warmer. Michael J. Fox, Robert De Niro and Kenny Rogers are among the stars who have been known to show up during high ski season, usually during or after filming in nearby Vancouver.

But what may seem formidable and exclusive in the winter turns downright cozy and casual in the summer. Watch as a valet wheels a guest’s mountain bike through the lobby as if it were a piece of Louis Vuitton luggage.

“We tend to play it low-key; we don’t make a big fuss and dance about it,” says Chateau Whistler General Manager David Roberts, smiling demurely from a tapestry lobby chair.

Roberts’ comment does seem to reflect the personality of the hotel, the first mountain resort chateau built in almost a century by Canadian Pacific Hotels and Resorts. During my brief stay there last month, the doorman greeted me and my family like special guests at a country estate, despite our being layered in road dust. The concierge bent over backward to fill a last-minute request for a baby sitter, and a desk clerk turned a request to find a child’s lost bathing suit into the hunt for the Holy Grail. And it all seemed to be business as usual for them.

There’s another nicety about staying here in the off-season: price. What would be out of sight for most folks during the hotel’s high ski season becomes an affordable splurge from spring through fall.

For example, the room in which my husband, my two children and I stayed sleeps four on two queen beds. It was listed for about $136 (tack on an extra $17 if you want a “ski view” of Blackcomb Mountain) from April 21 to Dec. 18. But from mid-December through mid-April, the same room goes for about $204. Pricier one- and two-bedroom suites range from about $255 to $390 in summer; in winter, the rates jump from $375 to $575, respectively.

(These, of course, are “rack rates” or the posted price, which we didn’t pay. Because of some confusion when we checked in and a seasonal special, we actually got our room for about $100.)

Note also that these lower summer rates apply well into late fall, and that the daytime temperatures average in the mid-to-high 70s into October.

Before you can fully appreciate the chateau, however, you have to understand the area and why Canadian Pacific, operator of such landmark establishments as The Empress in Victoria and the Banff Springs Hotel, decided to build here.

The resort municipality of Whistler is about a two-hour drive north of Vancouver on Highway 99, romantically labeled the Sea to Sky Highway. Its geographical landmarks are Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, both more than 7,000 feet high, and five lakes. Until the mid-1970s, the resort was a modest haven for fishermen and, with a few runs, supported a fledgling ski business. From the time it was first settled by white men around the turn of the century, the area wasn’t much more than a rough-and-tumble whistle-stop along the railway line. The site where the two mountains converge--now Whistler Village--served as a garbage dump.

All that started to change in 1976, however, when visionaries in the community drew up development proposals for Blackcomb Mountain. The community also devised a plan for a town center that included hotels and shops. Two years later, the provincial government gave the municipality 53 acres to develop the village, which it did by attracting investors lured by the area’s potential for world-class skiing. As the village expanded, so did the ski service on the two mountains.

Canadian Pacific was among the developers that recognized the potential--there weren’t many sites left where a ski resort hotel could be built at the base of a mountain, Roberts said. And it would be only a five-minute walk from what is today Whistler Village.

Today the village supports more than 50 hotels and restaurants and an abundance of retail shops and night clubs. Whistler’s permanent population of 5,000 swells to about 8,000 during the winter. (Of the more than 200 runs on Blackcomb and Whistler mountains, 80% are marked expert or intermediate.) And in prime ski times, the resort can easily draw an additional 10,000 visitors.

And the building isn’t over. While we were there, the air from dawn to dusk was filled with sounds of saws, drills and hammers putting together more condos, hotels and vacation homes.

Whistler Village, where only pedestrians are allowed, serves as the heart of the valley. There is a deliberate order to it: Nothing gets built without approval from a design panel to ensure that the project complies visually and architecturally with what Roberts refers to as “the great plan.”

Depending on your sensibilities, this homogenized look can be either reassuring or restricting. Those who like it say it keeps out the glass boxes and retains a European flavor. The editor of a local magazine and one of Whistler’s original ski bums, however, compares modern Whistler to the village in the old TV series “The Prisoner,” all plastic and artificial.

I found it a bit contrived, but I liked the outdoor cafes, flower boxes and wide pedestrian walkways. And nothing, it seems, including Chateau Whistler, is more than a five-minute walk from anything else.

As we drove up to the hotel’s main entrance in July, a fresh-faced, college-age doorman greeted us with a genuine smile as he took our bags. He didn’t seem to notice the horse dung clinging to my boots or to those of my 6-year-old, left over from a few days’ riding in the sagebrush a three-hour drive away.

And he only grinned when a couple of my toddler’s diapers tumbled out of our small mountain of battered baggage as he loaded it onto the luggage cart. Or if he did notice, he didn’t seem to care, for in this luxury hotel, dress is decidedly casual--most guests wear shorts, T-shirts or jeans. We were ushered into the lobby by light: mountain sunshine as clear as nearby glacier-fed Fitzsimmons Creek. It flooded through windows in the peaked, 40-foot vaulted ceiling of what the hotel calls its Great Hall--windows through which you can see blooming mountain wildflowers.

Most of the interior decorations were created by Canadian artists and crafts people, many of them from British Columbia. The walls in the Great Hall are stenciled with rows of huge maple leaves that seem to be dancing a chorus line in the wind. Impressionist oil paintings vaguely evoke harvest scenes.

The maple-leaf motif is repeated in several living-room-sized hooked rugs spread over green slate tiles arranged in a geometric pattern. Antique hutches, tables and chairs decorate the lobby and halls. Mennonite quilts hang in the halls.

The five-foot-square columns in the hall are made of cream and beige Squamish rock, quarried from the neighboring municipality; the paneling is pecan. A huge fireplace at the mountain side of the hall was made of Indiana limestone and carved by Welsh cathedral masons brought over specially for the task.

Our room, however, was not so special. It was as if some timber baron decided to build a baronial mansion nonpareil, instructed his builders to use only the best of materials on the first floor, left interior decorations to his well-educated wife’s impeccable taste, then turned the top floors over to the bean counters.

The space of our room--classified as “premiere”--was, well, stingy. Oh, the bathroom was lovely (but also a bit small), with its marble-topped counters and thick cotton towels. The closets were adequate and the ski view of Blackcomb Mountain fantastic. We also thought the complimentary basket of candies, cookies and assorted snacks perched atop the armoire that encased the TV a nice touch, as was the pay-per-sip in-room bar.

Regardless, we definitely felt cramped--the kids took to hopping from one bed to the other to get across the room rather than be constantly underfoot. And we didn’t even notice a superb wrought-iron floor lamp until packing to leave. That’s because it was shoved snug into a corner, virtually hidden by the other furniture.

And this motel-size room space is more the rule than the exception: 290 of the hotel’s 343 rooms are classified “premiere,” measuring an average 450 square feet.

The small room wasn’t the only sign of the hotel’s keeping a keen eye on the bottom line. The health club keeps a table stocked with fresh coffee, rolls and soft drinks. But a sign asks guests to please first pay for these goodies. Geez, even the budget-conscious La Quinta Inn back in Seattle offered free coffee.

But only a curmudgeon could fault the service, which was impeccably polite--a legacy of the province’s British heritage, perhaps? Consider the case of the lost bathing suit:

On our first day at the hotel, we gave the health club a workout on its service. After drying and dressing following a frolic in the pool, my daughter misplaced her wet swimming suit. We checked the locker room--no suit. I asked the young woman behind the desk--many of the hotel’s 280 employees appear to be college age--if anyone had turned it in. She started to check behind the counter. No luck. She checked the back rooms on the chance that a clerk from another shift had found the suit and put it there. Zero. Then she called the front desk. When she struck out there, she called housekeeping. Also a blank.

But this woman was not about to give up. On the off chance that my daughter had somehow accidentally tossed the wet suit into the huge towel hamper, she started to dig through that, whipping out a day’s worth of wet towels.

We never did find the suit, but I was mightily impressed by her efforts, which all sprang from one simple request from me.

We were also impressed by the hotel staff’s response to another request from me, this one put in at the last minute.

When I asked the young concierge about finding a baby sitter for our children while we dined, she assured me that it would be no problem and patiently explained the hotel’s thorough screening policies. My choices ranged from high-schoolers to grandmothers, she said. When would I like to schedule her?

I smiled, looked her in the eye and said, “In about four hours.”

She didn’t blink, just kept smiling. I’m 99% sure we can find someone who will merit your approval, she assured me, while fielding phone calls and questions from other guests.

And she was right. an hour later, she called to tell me about a young woman in the payroll department who often baby-sat for guests for extra income. She was reliable, liked children and she was sure I would like her. It would cost us the standard $8 an hour, for a minimum of three hours, plus $5 for cab fare home, or a total of about $25 U.S.

Ruth, a young woman in her mid-20s, showed up exactly at the agreed-upon 8 p.m. She was more prompt than we--who had returned just 15 minutes before, hot and sweaty after walking back from the town center, where we had locked ourselves out of our car. She didn’t mind in the least that, after showering and dressing, we finally left for dinner 45 minutes later than planned.

The chateau’s service extends beyond the hotel’s perimeter via its Adventure Desk, which is designed to take advantage of one of the chateau’s biggest appeals, winter or summer--the great outdoors.

The desk will gladly arrange the following. All you have to do is show up (but be prepared to pay the bill later):

- For golf enthusiasts, there’s the hotel’s 18-hole, 6,635-yard course designed by Robert Trent Jones II (par 72), with elevation changes of 300 feet.

- The hotel maintains three tennis courts staffed by a resident coach available for one-on-one sessions. A kiddie tennis camp will keep the little nippers occupied.

- For the more sedentary, a 25-minute ride on the ski lift--a short walk out the hotel’s back door--goes to the top of the glacier. Not recommended for acrophobics. - For more action, hang your mountain bike on hooks on the back of the lift chair to later ride what in winter becomes an abundance of black-diamond runs. Or take your skis and go for a few runs down the glacier.

- Roller-blading clinics are broken into beginner, intermediate, advanced, kids only and women only.

- There’s jet-boat river tours on one of the area’s five lakes or a hot-air ballon ride. And for folks who really want to get away from it all, at least for the day, a helicopter will deposit you atop an alpine peak.

- For a tamer diversion, llamas will carry gourmet lunches on mild hikes on nearby trails.

Some of these activities will easily set you back close to $200 per person. But if you’re on a budget, as we were, and still want to have a grand adventure, go on a hike in the nearby woods--it’s free--and save your money for the hotel’s Wildflower restaurant.

I’ve never understood why most hotel restaurants, even ritzy ones, often serve mediocre food. I’ve learned not to expect much from them and therefore have rarely been disappointed.

The meal produced in the Wildflower’s cavernous kitchens, however, was one of the best I’ve ever had. Maybe that’s because most of the food comes from regional farms and rivers, which keeps this restaurant, decorated in sunshine yellows and beiges, true to its roots. Its menus are engineered by executive chef Bernard Casavant, a 35-year-old B.C. native who has hosted Charles and Diana and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

I started with an appetizer of a Brie cashew turnover (sort of a Brie en croute), set on a bed of red oak leaf lettuce with a kiwi vinaigrette drizzled over it. It was a delicious blend of rich creamy cheese flavors balanced by the vinaigrette and the sweetness of the locally grown lettuce.

My husband had smoked fish and fennel chowder in a tomato base, which had a substantial, smoky flavor.

We ordered a white Bordeaux from a varied wine list that included selections from California, Australia and, of course, British Columbia. While waiting for our entrees, we munched on several different types of rolls, baked in the kitchen.

My main course was grilled venison steak and salmon, served with a wildberry chutney and pineapple mint butter. I hesitated to order this because I’m not fond of gamey flavors, but I couldn’t resist trying the Chateau’s version of surf ‘n’ turf. The venison was so fresh that it was sweet, and the mild-flavored salmon proved its perfect compliment.

My husband ordered the baked seafood cannelloni, stuffed with spinach, wild mushroom, roma tomatoes and an olive compote. There was no mistaking the freshness of the seafood. Where my dish had a sweet aftertaste, his packed a powerful punch.

We finished off our meal, which cost about $85 including wine, with drinks in the Mallard Bar, a dark-paneled retreat made to look like a library and where they also make a mean martini.

Of course, the true test of any hotel is, would we stay here on a return visit?

It depends. The area is a visual wonderland and definitely worth a return trip. And if we were budgeted for a splurge and could get a special rate, we would most definitely check in again.

But if we were watching our dollars, we would probably instead stay at one of several charming bed and breakfast inns in the area and save our extra cash for the jewel in this resort’s crown: dinner at the Wildflower.

And while sipping chilled wine and chomping on Casavant’s huckleberry chutney, I would think of one of those old dowager hotels and mentally thumb my nose at her.