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This year, Vail Resorts, Whistler’s owner, gave it a brand spanking new 10-passenger gondola to whisk Creekside skiers up the mountain in record time. And with a new six-person chairlift as well, this formerly local secret isn’t so secret anymore.
Fresh from a two-phase, multiyear renovation that began during the pandemic, the Fairmont Chateau Whistler revealed its updated 519 guest rooms and suites in December 2022.
There is a humbleness about this approach that seems to respect the topography, the grandness of the mountains, that seems to have inspired the home itself with the Café Canal stone walls and the multiplane roof.
A staid brutalism flirts with airy woods, with the percentage of both varying from room to room, as if a dualism is playing out in the materials.
Dashing through the snow is all the more, well, dashing, when one partakes in a sleigh ride amid perfectly exquisite scenery (with a warm drink in mitten-clad hand).
Like the surrounding mountains, the structure towers and juts in a sculptural way, marking itself as more than just a dwelling.
Made with prefabricated materials from BC Passive House in Pemberton, Buckhorn represents the lineage of passive housing in British Columbia, which began in in the province during the 2010 Olympics with the Lost Lake PassivHaus.
With massive columns propping up an overhanging roof at the edge of the forest, this house, from certain angles, looks more like a temple to sport than a chalet.
A house that rises out of the bedrock like the mountains that surround it.
