The Gstaad Guy

It is tempting, however, to keep looking inwards. Gstaad Guy’s new, first-of-its-kind spec is known officially as the Bentayga EWB Chalet Edition. As its name suggests, it hopes to foster the warm, elegant, swaddling interiors of the very best Swiss chalets. “The Gstaad Guy is always going back to his chalet, in some way,” he tells me. “Either physically or emotionally — trying to get that Chalet feeling, that family feeling, that cosiness and safety and elegance, in every element of his life.”

But it was a feeling had always been missing, however, when Gstaad Guy was on the road — “driving between the chalet and the beach home and the city home,” he says. “And so that was the intention here: to truly put a chalet on the road for the very first time...”

The level of detail is deep but tranquil, like the cool waters of a mountain lake. You dip a toe in, and soon you’re fully immersed. At first, the exterior of the Bentayga EWB Chalet looks to be a sleek, understated grey. Then the soft morning light hits it, and you see an infinitesimally subtle sparkle of green emerge, too — mimicking that mineral, vegetal stone of the very best mountain homes. “There are subtle details on the inside of the car of the Alpine rose, too,” Gstaad Guy says, “which is very common around Swiss chalets. Then we have the brown lining at the bottom of the car, in a nod to the soil and nature,” he says.

“And on the inside, the feeling and the intention is of the very best wood: different layers and colours of wood combining,” he says, running his hand along the open pour liquid amber veneer on the dash. “It reminds me almost of a cigar humidor, in that way. The leather itself has all these different shades of brown, made to match with the natural tonality of the veneer around the car. And there are smaller details, too — like this very cosy tweed in the door lining, which looks like the blankets you would be wrapped in at your chalet…” Lounging in the back seat for a section of the drive, I become particularly fond of the deep Dynamica headrests, and the tweed detailing on the fold-out foot rest. But the bespoke Chalet welcome lamps that beam upon the ground when you open the doors are a lovely, subtle touch, too — like the warm beacons of a homely chalet at the end of long, dark, snowy road. The design process, Gstaad Guy says, “took a while to ideate and bring it all to reality. But the vision was quite clear from the start.” 

Gstaad Guy is getting there himself. “I am slightly ahead of where I thought I’d be in my connoisseurship journey, thanks to my exposure and the things I’m able to experience,” he says. “But there’s still a long journey to go. I’m just getting started.” The Bentayga EWB Chalet Edition was a big milestone on that journey, in fact.

“For the first three years of Gstaad Guy, I focused a lot on the ‘what’. What does this guy consume? What does he wear?,” he says. “Then the next phase was the ‘how’. How do these people like him consume these things? And then the final stage was the ‘why’ — really questioning the need for consumption and these kinds of experiences, and what they bring to the people that consume them.”

“I have now realised that the final element of the ‘what’ is this, the Bentayga Chalet Edition. For me, the missing piece was always what the Gstaad Guy would drive,” he says, as the cowbells toll beneath us and the sun gilds the mountaintops. “And I think with the Chalet, we’ve found that. And now the character is complete.”