Local Heroes: Janne Lipsanen
From race boards in Mikkeli to building one of Finland’s strongest snowboard
Matteo Thun’s mountain hotel at the foot of Kronplatz is about as five-star as it gets. So what happens when you turn up with three frothing kids?!
Words by Alex Hapgood, SBI
You know within about 30 seconds of walking into the Falkensteiner Hotel Kronplatz that you’re somewhere a bit special. It’s not just the scale of the lobby or the light pouring through the glass. It’s the feeling that someone has thought very hard about every single thing you’re looking at.
We rolled in at 10am on a bright spring morning: my wife and I and our 3 boys, ages 15, 13 and 11. Our board bags were immediately whisked off to the boot room: so far so five-star.
That feeling of thoughtfulness is no accident. The hotel opened in December 2020 and was designed by Matteo Thun, the South Tyrol-born architect and designer behind some of the most talked-about hotels in the Alps. His brief to himself was to take the traditional style of the region and reinterpret it in a contemporary way. The inspiration came from the Dolomites themselves, and from the mountaineers who shaped this corner of Italy. “By alpinists for alpinists,” as Falkensteiner puts it.
The result is four wooden buildings, each one representing a season. That idea carries right through into the 97 rooms and suites, which are colour-coded to match: red for summer, blue for winter, green for spring and yellow for autumn. Floor-to-ceiling glass and wraparound terraces give you 180-degree views of the mountains and surrounding villages. A green inner courtyard brings the outside in. There’s art on the walls throughout, and the whole place feels contemporary and classy.
It’s a member of The Leading Hotels of the World, which tells you where it sits in the pecking order. We are talking high end… The restaurant is beautiful, and the On the Rocks bar off the lobby is the kind of place you find yourself lingering in far longer than planned.
Here’s the thing, though. A hotel this polished could easily feel a bit precious with three kids in tow. It doesn’t. The vibe is properly kid-friendly while still being insanely luxurious, and the staff couldn’t have been more accommodating from the moment we arrived.
The kids were looked after brilliantly. There’s an indoor climbing wall, complete with its own children’s route, and a games room with table football, air hockey and a stack of board games. There’s a timetable of activities running through the day too, which, as any parent will know, translates roughly as: you can actually enjoy a cocktail while the kids are occupied. We did. More than once.
Ask our three what they loved and you’ll get the climbing wall, chilling in the room and, in middle child’s words: “the whole five-star thing”. Fair enough. Our room even had its own infrared sauna, which is a long way from your standard budget ski apartment… And the balcony was warm enough to soak up the spring sunshine at the end of the day.
The food is in a different league. The kitchen runs on a 7 Summit Slow Food concept built around local and seasonal produce, and it shows. Breakfast is a serious affair (there’s an entire counter dedicated to butter, and the hotel bakes its own Kronplatz bread), but what really won us over was the speed. Order eggs Benedict from the open kitchen and they’re in front of you within minutes, which meant we were regularly up the mountain within half an hour of sitting down. For a family of five with snowboards to wrangle, that’s almost more rapid than a quick bowl of cereal…
The evenings are where the kitchen really shows off. Head chef Federico Carsili’s 7Summit Restaurant takes South Tyrolean cooking and gives it an Alpine-meets-Mediterranean twist, with seven signature dishes, each one inspired by a Dolomite peak. Dinner kicks off with antipasti, then you pick your way through starters, mains and desserts from the daily menu, or hand it over to the kitchen with the gourmet set menu. There’s a cheese board of local specialities to finish, if you’ve still got room, and the desserts come from the hotel’s own patisserie.
It’s 100% five-star for the adults, but there are solid options for the fussier eaters at the table too. Nobody went to bed hungry, and nobody had to settle for nuggets. And if you fancy one more before bed, the On the Rocks bar has a signature cocktail for each of those seven peaks. It would be rude not to try a few.
Then there’s the Acquapura Summit Spa, a four-floor building of its own with saunas, steam rooms and a 25m sports pool. They run organised sauna and steam sessions later in the day, which are well worth timing your afternoon around.
The real showstopper is the outdoor pool on the roof. It looks straight out over the mountains, and from the water you can pick out the runs you’ve been shredding all day, all the way back down into the village. Floating there with tired legs, tracing your lines from the morning, is one of those holiday moments that stays with you.
Getting to the snow couldn’t be easier. The lift station is a short walk away, or an even shorter hop on the hotel shuttle, and the boot room is spacious with heated boot dryers, so every morning starts with warm, dry boots. Small thing, massive difference.
It’s an insane place to come back to after a day on the mountain. The hardest part of the whole week was resisting the urge to end each day a little bit early…
Kronplatz is a bit different from most resorts, in that it’s all one mountain. You ride up to the broad summit plateau, and from there runs peel off in five different directions, down to different villages and different corners of the resort. The lift system is almost entirely gondolas and chairs, so you spend the day riding rather than wrestling kids on to drag lifts.
The pistes are exceptionally well groomed, and there are loads of super-wide runs built for speed. Side hits are the order of the day, and our kids spent the week hunting out quick lines, hitting every roller they could find, working on their carving and throwing press tricks wherever there was space. We were there over Easter and it was quiet, with plenty of room to open up.
It was a properly warm week, so we got classic spring slush rather than powder. By late morning the whole mountain had softened into that buttery, forgiving snow that makes everyone ride a little braver. The afternoons were perfect for slashing and laying down fast, wide turns, and with pistes that wide you can really let the board run. When it does snow, there’s no shortage of terrain to make the most of it.
The Snowpark was a big hit. It sits at 2,230m, just below the summit, and while it’s not huge, it’s really well put together. It’s split into an Easy Line, separate Medium Rail and Medium Kicker lines, and a Family Fun Line, so there’s always a natural next step when you’re ready for it. Small and bigger kickers, rails and boxes, with plenty for beginner and intermediate riders. It’s no backwater either – the park hosts rounds of the South Tyrol slopestyle tour and the Italian Freeski Slopestyle Championships.
We hit it what felt like several hundred times. It was never too busy, laps were quick, and the kids came away with a broader bag of tricks than they arrived with. There’s also a small halfpipe-cum-snake-run with a mellow transition, great for practising drops and getting tricks in and out of the walls.
There’s also a timed speed run, which very quickly became competitive. Naturally, every run turned into a rematch. You can straight-line it and hit some pretty impressive speeds. And the four-lane boardercross produced a few takedowns and the odd family argument, but was super fun! Four of you dropping in side by side, elbows out, is about as close as a family holiday gets to a proper contest.
Lunch on the mountain is solid too. There are around 30 huts and restaurants spread across Kronplatz, and they lean more South Tyrolean than Italian, so think speck dumplings with sauerkraut and Kaiserschmarrn as well as pizza and pasta. In the spring sunshine the terraces are the place to be, and on colder days you can retreat into a cosy wood-panelled Stube. Either way, a good thing on a hungry day.
Kronplatz is a chill, family-friendly mountain. If you’re looking for big hits and a huge range of lines, it probably isn’t the place for you. But for intermediate or beginner riders, it’s absolutely perfect for long days of carving and hitting its well-considered range of features.
Pair that with the Falkensteiner as your base, and you’ve got a family snowboard trip that’s hard to beat. Everyone was riding hard all day and then coming back to five-star luxury. The kids loved it. So did we.
SBI stayed at Kronplatz as a guest of Falkensteiner Hotels & Residences.
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