Le Chalet du Skieur is a monograph on the man who invented the form. In 1927, Henry-Jacques Le Même drew his first ski chalet for Baroness Noémie de Rothschild on the slopes of Mont d'Arbois in Megève. Around 250 chalets followed across the French Alps, and a way of building mountain houses was set for the century.
Trained under the Art Deco master Émile Jacques Ruhlmann, Le Même brought salon-grade detailing into the mountains: concrete frames on stone bases, timber cladding, oversized windows opening onto the slope, double-pitched roofs, Combloux granite fireplaces, ironwork and cabinetry made to be lived with for generations. Comfort and craft, with the modesty of a working farmhouse.
Writer Elsa Cau and photographers Jeanne Perrotte and M. Tripper take 208 pages to settle into a single chalet: the cabinetry named by maker, the Prieuré lamp brought back into production in 2022 with Maison Henry Jacques Le Même, the rooms as their owners use them in winter and out of it. Bilingual French and English, printed in France.
The volume belongs to the wider Iconic Edition project, the publishing arm of the Iconic House collection, where each property worth visiting gets a book worth keeping. With Le Chalet du Skieur, the catalogue reaches back to the source: the architect who set the style and the rooms he designed to hold it.
