Escape to the very best design hotels in the Italian Dolomites

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Think apple strudel, dumplings and potatoes, ski slopes, forest foraging, mountain views, saunas and uber-chic design hotels.

Believe it or not, this isn’t Austria or even Germany. Say “hello” to Italy’s Dolomites. Particularly South Tyrol and the surrounding area.

The beautiful region is another Italy. One that has its own language, Laden, and where in addition to Italian, German is native too.

A destination where glorious Renaissance and Baroque monuments or cathedrals are replaced by castles, Romanesque architecture with alpine wood, buongiorno with a guten morgen.

This part of the boot shares the UNESCO heritage-protected Dolomite mountains (le Dolomiti in Italian), with provinces and towns like Trentino and Belluno.

Handed over to Italy by the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of World War II, it remains an autonomous province where recent history melds beautifully with the present.

Here and right across the Dolomites, the present consists of food and wine, nature, wellness and sleek, design-centric boutique hotels.

It’s filled with places to soak, indulge, ski and après-ski, all with the precision of Northern European service delivered with that sought-after Italian flair and warmth, and to call on an overused term – a little dolce vita.

The chic hotels here juxtapose soft white pillows with hair-raising mountain edges, while the drive through this bizarre rock formation isn’t for the faint-hearted. It’s quintessentially Italian in that it’s a panoramic show off. But unconventionally Italian too.

“[It’s] a place of encounters and contradictions between two – or three, if you add Ladin [the ancient language of the Dolomites] diverse cultures: precision and attention to detail that is typically German and joy for the good life, that is typically Italian,” says award-winning local winemaker Andrea Moser of Cantina Kaltern, who calls the Dolomites home.

“Each moderates and exalts the other, culminating in something quite amazing. Add to that, an incredible climate with around 300 days a year of sunshine that has you bathing in a lake one minute to heights of 3,000 meters the next.”

Famous mountain climber Reinhold Messner is said to have referred to the Dolomites as a piece of art, and his words certainly ring true.

The Dolomite Mountains are in constant flux, engendering wonder as the sun rises and sets, every angle offering a different shade, different perspective.

“Their jagged peaks, sheer cliff faces and crags are quite spectacular, and watching the ‘enrosadira’, the beautiful phenomenon by which most of the peaks take on a pink or reddish color at dawn and dusk, is very special indeed,” says Ursula…