1 · Position
A private members’ ski club and restaurant in a chalet at the top of the Wasserngrat, the mountain carrying the area’s steepest run. Founded in 1957; the first president was the Earl of Warwick, and the founding members included the Aga Khan — LHL-P-054 — with, in one account, a throng of viscounts, barons and countesses. The menu is deliberately plain: fondue on the tables, veal, sausages, pasta. Reported membership is about £25,000 with a three-year waiting list, which is a journalist’s figure and not a published one.
2 · ⚑ A founding member describes what the club is for, and the Library records it
Taki Theodoracopulos, who joined in the year of its inception because the Earl of Warwick said he was the only Greek he could understand in English, wrote after nearly sixty years that he is now reduced to keeping out Russians and Arabs, although one or two of the latter have managed to slip by me. The Library records this because it is the plainest statement in the register of what a members’ committee actually does, written by a member rather than inferred by an observer. It sits in the same file as the Pebble Beach covenants at LHL-P-399 and the rule barring Monégasques from the tables at LHL-017: three houses, three centuries of the same instrument, and the register states it rather than admiring the view.
3 · The pair it belongs to
The Alps hold two of these and the register should hold both: the Eagle at Gstaad and the Corviglia at St. Moritz, the latter older, from the 1930s. The same account calls them the two focal points of their villages. ⚑ Corviglia is not in this register and on the Library’s own test it belongs here.
4 · Candour
⚑ The club publishes almost nothing; every figure in this entry comes from journalism or from members writing in the press. Not established: the membership number, the joining terms, the ownership of the chalet, and whether the reported £25,000 is a joining fee or an annual subscription. The quoted description of the door policy is one member’s account of himself and is recorded as such.