Best hotels in St. Moritz, Switzerland | Visually Compare Top Stays Side-by-Side

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in St. Moritz, Switzerland

St. Moritz has been performing its particular version of alpine grandeur since the 1860s, when Johannes Badrutt famously bet a group of English summer guests that the winter sun would warm them enough to sit outside without coats. He won, and in winning, essentially invented the concept of the winter resort. The hotels that rose around this wager are not merely places to sleep after a day on the Corviglia runs — they are physical records of that ambition, built to receive royalty, industrialists, and eventually the global moneyed class that has kept the Engadin valley humming ever since. The two addresses that matter most to this legacy face each other across the hierarchy of the town itself. Badrutt's Palace, sitting above the lake on its commanding promontory, has occupied this position since 1896, its turreted silhouette becoming as associated with the resort as the frozen lake below. The interior has been refreshed repeatedly without losing the sense of accumulated ceremony that only genuinely old hotels carry. Nearby, the Kulm Hotel predates even Badrutt's Palace, having hosted its first guests in 1856 and later serving as the finishing line for the Cresta Run — a fact that gives it a more athletic, Anglo-Swiss character than its neighbor. The Carlton Hotel St. Moritz occupies the same central orbit and represents something closer to a considered mid-century manner, quieter in register than either of the grand palace hotels but still operating at altitude in every sense. The more interesting counterpoint lies a short drive toward the Suvretta hillside, where Suvretta House has maintained an almost willful remove from the town center since 1912. Designed in a grand Swiss hotel tradition that draws on Historicist forms without ever quite committing to a single period, it sits within its own grounds above the tree line, with views that make the hotel feel self-contained rather than socially embedded in the resort. Where Badrutt's Palace and the Kulm are places where St. Moritz society converges, Suvretta House is where people go precisely to avoid that convergence. For a traveler who wants to read the full range of what this valley has produced in hospitality terms, the contrast between these two gravitational points — the palace hotels on the lake and the Suvretta on its private hill — is the most telling comparison the town has to offer.