Hotel de Len

Until 2022 this building on Cortina's high street was the Hotel Impero, the Empire. GRIS+DAINESE, a studio from Venice, remade it and gave it a humbler name: de Len is Ladin, the local language, for of wood. The name is meant literally. Timber fins run up the white front, and inside the walls are reclaimed pine and old fir, giving way in the restaurant to walls and a ceiling of old oak. In the bedrooms, plank ceilings and a bedside cube of weathered wood meet a dark green headboard and a curtain of mustard velvet. Under the beds are Magma13 panels, there to see off "dirty" electricity, in case the wood was not enough. At the top is the spa, for adults only, from two in the afternoon until eight. It has a steam bath and an outdoor hot tub above the lights of the town, but the seat to want is in the Finnish sauna, which looks across at the Faloria and the bell tower.

Recommended for skiers who would rather come home to a town than to a piste, and for families happy to leave the spa to the adults, with babysitting for a fee and a free cot for babies up to two. Corso Italia is a few minutes' walk. The Faloria and Tofana cable cars are under five minutes away on the hotel's free shuttle, and the skis can be hired before you leave. Breakfast runs until half past ten, late enough to let the first lift go without you. At dinner order the Piatto Quadro, a square plate that serves four things at once, and afterwards Bar de Len mixes its cocktails with barrel-aged spirits: wood again, this time in the glass.