Chalet Rustique, Luxury catered chalet, French Alps

Welcome to Chalet Rustique. We thought we would introduce ourselves. My name is Paolo and I run a ski chalet alongside my girlfriend Lindsey. We moved from Jersey in the Channel Islands to Chatel in the Northern French Alps in November 2006. We decided to follow our dream of running a ski chalet after spending many holidays snowboarding. The months leading up to the move have not been easy,to say the least, it really was just like you see in the television programmes.
We spent about a month and half searching the French and Swiss Alps, before settling on the Abondance Valley which links into Portes du Soleil, the ski area in Europe. We came across two British builders,who were in the process of building a new chalet which we viewed off plan. They showed us around come of the chalets they had built previously and as soon as we walked into them, we knew we had the right constructors.
Our chalet is situated between Chatel and La Chapelle D'Abondance. We are 20 second drive to the nearest ski lift.
We have now completed our first season and considering the chalet was still not ready and it was close to the time of our first clients arriving (!) it has not been too bad. It's been hard work - as a trained chef I have been doing all the cooking (please check out future posts for recipes), driving clients to the slopes, while Lindsey is in charge of the front of house and bookkeeping.
Now that the summer is here we have a lot more time to relax, enjoying the green mountains and lots of Mountainbiking (which is nothing like the mountainbiking we did back in Jersey!).
I hope you stay posted to our blog, we will be posting more about events happening at the chalet and activites in and around the valley. See you soon!