Four Seasons Resort Whistler

The Coast Mountains are famously wild and untamed. But that doesn’t mean their hotels have to be. In fact, there’s an opportunity there for the sort of inspiring contrast that some of the best hotels are made of. Take a vibrant and relatively unpretentious British Columbia ski town and add a thoroughly polished contemporary-style luxury resort and you’ve got the makings of some fruitful contradictions. This is the Four Seasons Resort Whistler.

The location isn’t quite central, a few minutes from the main village — appropriate for the sort of rarefied seclusion the Four Seasons is aiming for, which is a difficult thing to achieve in a popular resort town. But if you’re here to ski Whistler and Blackcomb you could really do a lot worse than to have a shuttle ride to the foot of the mountain, where the Ski Concierge presents you with your gear.

As for the hotel itself, you’ll have little difficulty getting comfortable. The rooms are equal parts rustic and genteel, and the smallest, the humbly named “moderate room,” is five hundred square feet of state-of-the-art luxury, with a gas fireplace and a deep soaking tub, both quite useful at the end of a day on the slopes. From there it only gets bigger and better, through executive suites and premier suites and presidential suites, and outside the lodge proper into the resort residences, the two- to four-bedroom villas which go quite a bit beyond the size and scope of the typical hotel suite.

Along with the high-end accommodations, of course, comes a whole complement of luxury-resort amenities. The gym and spa offerings are expansive, the culinary options many and varied, and the activities go well beyond a bit of skiing — if it can be done outdoors, summer or winter, the Four Seasons can arrange it.