This is the chalet that our group has been staying in for the last week:
We've been calling it a tree house. It is 5 levels in total. And you circulate through the house using a spiral staircase in the center of it. It's space efficient, but there are a lot of stairs.
The site is downhill from the road, which, as we have talked about before, creates a more challenging build than uphill from the road.
You enter the chalet on the third level, which itself houses 2 bedrooms. One floor below and one floor above also have 2 bedrooms, meaning there are 6 bedrooms in total. On the lowest floor is an indoor hot tub, a shared parking garage, and a shared ski/snowboard room.
Every mountain house needs, at a minimum, two things: a fireplace and a hot tub. Ideally the latter is outside.
As is typical in the mountains, the main living space is on the top floor (level 5 in this case). You want this for the views. If you're building into a sloping site, the lowest floors are usually somewhat constrained.
We did the same thing with Parkview Mountain House. But it does mean that you circulate through the more "private" spaces within the house before reaching the more "public" ones. This is the opposite of what happens in most homes.
The underground parking garage is accessed by way of a small parking elevator that lowers you down two floors. Initially this seemed excessive, but it is a shared elevator/garage. The chalet is semi-detached chalet, if you will, and so this was probably the only way they could get enough parking on the site. Assuming our attached neighbor is of a similar size, that's 12 bedrooms.
It also creates an important pathway so that people don't need to bring their skis and snowboards through the house.
Every site has its challenges and that is especially the case in the mountains.
