OFF-PISTE started with a simple frustration: booking a chalet in the French Alps from the United States meant choosing between an anonymous rental platform and a handful of agencies that seemed to represent every property in the region, whether or not they'd actually set foot in it.
We do it differently. Every chalet in our collection has been visited by someone on our team, in person, more than once, in more than one season. We work directly with the owners, not through layers of sub-agents, which means we know the real story of each property: what it's actually like on a rainy Tuesday, not just in the photographs.
That's also why our collection stays small. We would rather represent nine chalets we've stayed in ourselves than ninety we've only seen in a listing. When you call us, you're not talking to a call center reading from a script, you're talking to someone who has climbed the stairs in Chalet Aviator and knows exactly which bedroom gets the morning light.
We're a New York ski chalet company at heart, a chalet rental agency for Americans built by people who understand what an American family actually needs to know before a first trip to the French Alps, and what they don't need to worry about. Our job is to translate the Alps for you, not the other way around.
The Alps aren't just a backdrop for a good ski trip. They're one of the few places left where the mountains, the table, and real hospitality all come together in a single week away. That's the idea behind OFF-PISTE.
I grew up in Beaujolais, in a family that has grown vines for generations, and I make my own wine there today, so good food and good wine are never an afterthought here. The mountains are where I've spent most of my life since: hiking, ski touring, mountaineering, trail running, cycling — winter or summer, I'm usually happier somewhere with altitude. I've moved between resorts across the Alps rather than settling on one, and I've traveled plenty beyond France too. Nothing else quite matches what you find here.
The chalet itself is the heart of it: a place you're genuinely glad to come back to at the end of the day, not just somewhere you sleep. Everything we build around it — the skiing, the wine, the people, the place — is what turns a great chalet into a week you'll never forget.
Thomas, Founder