Piste!

‘Après-Ski’ is a misleading phrase; a topsy-turvy misnomer. The party, of course, isn’t the après-ski. The skiing is simply the avant-party. Your time on the slopes is merely your penance for the night before or for the evening to come. It is the plausibile deniability that legitimises all that fondue and Braulio. The winter sports are simply the great cosmic blini. The accompanying fun is the rich and heady caviar. But the two together are the perfect combination, the great Alpine yin-and-yang. Cold, fresh mountain air, perfectly neutralised by 20 Camel Blues. A stonking headache beautifully equalised by the pure, driven snow. On the eighth day of the trip, God created the hangover. On the ninth, he invented the black run. Here, then, are the five great cathedrals in the sky — the finest and most storied Alpine nightclubs known to man. And woman. And quite often child, actually, depending on how good your older brother’s ID is and whether or not the owner knew your mother back in the seventies, and how is she anyway?

• Founded: 1971
• Address: Route de Verbier Station 55,
• 1936 Verbier, Switzerland
• Access: Those willing to queue, and those that don’t need to

The Farm Club was founded in 1971 by Italian brothers Serafino and Giuseppe Bernadi. But it was really put on the map in the early 1980s by motorsports playboy and Verbier high priest Paddy McNally and his jolly Brit-Euro menagerie. To this day, The Farm — one ought to say it like it’s one’s own farm, back in Shropshire, perhaps — still reserves a table for McNally every night, just below the DJ booth, and proximity to this perch has long defined the social hierarchy of the place. Back in the day, Fergie (McNally’s onetime girlfriend) and Stephanie of Monaco were frequent guests, along with Jamie Blandford and the like, and the regulars here had their own bottles of vodka stashed behind the bar, initialled in marker pen. (Table-service, of course, is the norm now.) Raucous behaviour was often encouraged. “This is not a church — it’s a club,” the Bernadis said. (Spiritually, Farm Club has long been aligned to the original Tramp, perhaps, in both its clientele and its secluded rambunctiousness.) As it did on the club’s very first night, “New York, New York” still rings out to mark the end of play at The Farm, at usually 4am — meaning many head from The Farm directly to breakfast and out onto the slopes.

• Founded: 1974
• Address: Via Foppas, Plazza Gunter Sachs,
• 7500 St Moritz, Switzerland
• Access: Members and their guests only

I have an old poster, a reproduction of an invitation to a Drac’s party from the 1970s, back when King of St Moritz Gunter Sachs was at the height of his racing-supercars-on-the-frozen-lake powers. It says: “A night of damnation. Dress: Accordingly.” I like that. Diabolical casual. Horns and sportcoats. Located deep in the bowels of Hotel Kulm, it’s a sibling of the St Moritz Toboggan Club and its collarbone-collecting Cresta Run, so plenty of dancing in slings here. (Its full name is Dracula’s Ghost Riders Club). The nightclub is described on Kulm’s website as “a place where very famous people can behave like regular human beings again, free from the weight of their own legends,” according to its author, Konstanin Arnold. “They still have their flaws, escapades, bad days, and they even want to smoke, despite being American.” Newbies are encouraged to do a trust-fall backwards from a high mantelpiece. “If you want to swing from a chandelier, swing from a chandelier,” says Rolf Sachs, son of Gunter and the current impresario. “Even if you have to call the electrician every day.” But any too-raucous edges are smoothed out by the high-euro suaveness of the place — no photos, candlelit tables and a pleasing 18-to-80 age range, which does give one hope.

• Founded: 1959
• Address: Landstrasse 176, 7250
• Klosters-Serneus, Switzerland
• Access: Mostly anyone. It’s quite friendly

There’s only one nightclub in Klosters. But even if there wasn’t, Casa Antica would still be the only one. The name translates to ‘The Old House’, and the place has been open since 1959 — a moment when Klosters was a sort of Hollywood-on-High, with David Niven, Vivien Leigh, Peter Sellers, Truman Capote, Orson Welles, Julie Andrews, Gene Kelly, Audrey Hepburn and Greta Garbo as regulars. Proto Manhattan It-Girls Marisa and Berry Berenson used to DJ there in the seventies. Anjelica Huston met her boyfriend Arnaud de Rosnay — the photographer, adventurer, French aristo and long-distance windsurfer, who later disappeared in the Strait of Taiwan — on the dancefloor in the eighties. It’s that sort of place. The club, in an Alpine house with stag’s heads on the wall, has been spiritually linked to The Chesa Grischuna, the most beloved hotel in Klosters, where an old entry in the guest book mentions our now-King: “The Prince eats lunch at one of the cheapest places around. He was dancing at the Casa Antica… hires skis that he carries himself and invariably travels second-class on the sports train.” Princes William and Harry have also been known to cut a rug here, not that that’s interesting. And Nicky Haslam has visited so much over the years he probably now thinks it’s common.

• Founded: 1971
• Address: Palacestrasse 28, 3780 Gstaad, Switzerland
• Access: Visitors, guests, and members (by recommendation only)

When the Palace Hotel in Gstaad opened an outdoor pool in 1928, it imported sand from the Côte d’Azur to form a welcoming, homely beach for its jet-set, Riviera-loving clientele. Nearly one hundred years hence, the place is still a bastion of swaddling indulgence — not least in the GreenGo, the beloved nightclub in its depths, whose dance floor hovers above the pool. Tradition dictates that leavers of Le Rosey cannonball fully-clothed into the pool during their final winter term. One New Year’s Eve, LSD-populariser Timothy Leary jumped in and stayed there, submerged, for a little too long: a waiter dived in to rescue him. Nicholas Foulkes described the club, which was founded in 1971, as “Annabel’s of the Alps, the Studio 54 of the Saanen region.” Taki Theodoracopulos, longtime Gstaad resident, disagrees: “It was never like Studio,” he wrote in Gstaad Life in 2006, “but some lucky ones have had a quickie or two when Romano wasn’t looking…” Longtime maitre d’ Gildo Bocchini recalls how “Peter Sellers drank a lot, so I would have to bring him up to his room; nearly carry him.” Sellers would film part of 1975’s The Return Of The Pink Panther in the club. Today it has a sort of jovial Euro-Retro mood, with Loro Piana to the fore.