Rent traditional chalets in the Alps

Four markers, inherited from the farm building. The first is the roof: two very steep pitches, once covered in stone lauze or timber shingle, made to carry several metres of snow. The second is the stone base, which held the byre and lifted the floor off frozen ground. The third is the timber cladding higher up, where the hayloft sat. The fourth tells you most: the size of the openings. An old farmhouse has small windows, because every opening was heat lost. A house showing every traditional sign together with wide picture windows is a recent build, which is not a fault but a piece of information.

Yes, and it is in fact the heart of the type. Taking over a farmhouse means keeping the envelope, the roof frame and often the stone base, and redoing everything else: insulation, services, new south-facing openings, a new distribution of volumes. The result keeps the original beams and stone at a contemporary level of comfort. Two things are checked there. Ceiling heights, often modest on the lower floor, because nobody stood up in it. And light, which depends entirely on what the conversion dared to cut. A farmhouse converted with restraint stays dark in the afternoon, which shows poorly in photographs taken late in the morning.

Wherever there were farms before there were lifts. Six of the nine communes served fall into this case, all in Haute-Savoie, and all lived off livestock before they lived off skiing. Megève is the clearest example: a farming village in the Middle Ages, it has kept its church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, its scattered hamlets and a Calvary way of fifteen listed chapels, raised between 1840 and 1878. In Savoie the picture differs by resort. Méribel is not an old village but has held an architectural charter since the thirties, of timber, stone, double-pitched lauze roofs and contained heights, which gives traditional-looking fabric across the whole valley. Val d'Isère keeps an old village around its church.

A seriously converted farmhouse is not. A barely touched one clearly is. The gap turns on three items nobody sees: insulation of the roof space and the floors, the heating system, and hot-water output for a group. A house converted properly heats as well as a new build, with a greater thermal mass that even makes it steadier. Two constraints remain that cannot be corrected. Stairs, often steep and numerous, which weigh on young children or elderly parents. And sound between old floors, acceptable on airborne noise, worse on footsteps. Both are worth asking about before booking.