Zermatt: end of an era

Squashed between a couple of dowdy clothes shops in the Swiss skiing resort of Zermatt, Hotel Post looks anything but sophisticated. In fact it resembles an old barn.

It seems unimaginable that the place was the backdrop to a 1969 Milk Tray ad. Or that it still draws the season's most fashionable skiers: a gently decadent hangout for movers and shakers talking company buyouts over aprés-ski tipples.

Over the years, Hotel Post has cultivated a nigh-on fanatical following among wealthy revellers, celebrity and civilian. Its cult status is all down to one man: Karl Ivarsson, Zermatt's pied piper of fun - a fit, suave, handsome 73-year-old. Man and hotel go together like hand and glove. Or rather did, until the quietly spoken Swedish-American became embroiled in the resort's biggest scandal since the typhoid outbreak in 1967.

Skiers are agog at the Post's ousting of Ivarsson, ultimate party host and ladies' man, after more than 40 years at the helm. His like had not been seen in Zermatt before. Nor will be again. Although brochures still list him as hotel manager - having been printed before his departure last November - his eviction, after losing a long, bitterly fought legal battle to renew the hotel's lease, has left clients in mourning.

When Ivarsson acquired a 34-year lease from the Post's landlord, Felix Perren, in 1960, it was a sorry pile of rickety beds and decrepit chamber pots in a resort which might as well have had tumbleweed blowing through it: no night clubs, and bars locked well before midnight. Perren quickly saw the hotel's gold-mine potential when, that year, Ivarsson opened Zermatt's first disco, the Brown Cow (formerly a cow shed in the Post's basement). Soon he was luring the likes of Deep Purple's Jon Lord and Tony Ashton, who'd entertain for free board.

Nights ran with champagne in the Pink Elephant bar - all black-and-gold Biba wallpaper on the ceiling, an unforgettable full-size stuffed pink pachyderm commanding attention (Ivarsson even had it helicoptered to a mountain restaurant for his 50th birthday). The King of Sweden would breeze by in the 1970s, as would Chris Evans, two decades later.

Now Zermatt has lost a legend. Quite why Ivarsson lost his expensive legal battle no one knows - he blames bad advice - but, since 1994 when the lease terminated, he had been living on a knife-edge.

The court granted a three-year interim lease, then another in 1997. But when he won his case, landlord Perren appealed to the highest court in Switzerland and in October won on a technicality. Man and hotel parted ways in November.

While Ivarsson languishes in bankruptcy, Perren's 34-year-old son Martin has taken on the manager's mantle. "Karl's regulars are very upset with the way the landlord treated him after all he did for Zermatt," says another hotel proprietor. "Now they won't even go inside."

Richard Branson and Bob Geldof shunned the place last New Year's Eve in favour of Mood's, a new bar and bistro doing international food in a 200-year-old building, which happens to be run by Ivarsson's long-term girlfriend, Ursula. Here, the Post crowd can now be found congregating, lamenting the end of an era.