The pandemic has provoked considerable soul-searching in the luxury hotel industry. One report this year suggested that while concerns about social distancing remained, the smart money was in providing distinctive stays in unique locations to fewer guests.

After just conducting my own informal study of distinctive stays in unique locations in Switzerland, I’ve discovered a flaw in that model. However unique the location, the view from a luxury hotel is only as impressive as its windows are large.

The solution’s obvious. Get rid of the walls.

That is roughly the thinking behind Million Stars Hotel. Relaunched this summer (the international launch fell to travel restrictions last year), the Swiss national tourism project lists around 50 stays of varying degrees of sophistication: from luxury suites on the roofs of city hotels to al fresco beds beside mountain hostels, from geodesic glass domes to mattresses on haycarts. 

What all share is their direct view of the night sky. The aim, say the organisers, is to promote closer connections with the outdoors. Considering how much appeal outdoors Switzerland has, that seems entirely sensible. 

After cabin fever in spring then a dismal summer when Britain seemed sealed inside a Tupperware container, I booked two stays in the southern canton of Valais, a region popular with Swiss holidaymakers. That was the other reason I liked the sound of Million Stars Hotel – it highlights areas beyond hotspots such as Interlaken and St Moritz. 

The ascent from Mörel by cable car hints at what we’re missing. Riederalp is a road-free village composed of the sort of chalets you usually see on cuckoo clocks. A chairlift continues beyond to Hohfluh. The air cools, your ears pop as you pass 2,100m, then you feel a sharp pain as your jaw hits the floor. Ahead is the Aletsch glacier. 

The Alps’ largest glacier was why I’d booked stay number one: Cube Aletsch, on the summit of nearby Eggishorn. Well, that and the exclusivity – when the last cable car descends from the mountain in late-afternoon, the view is yours alone until morning.

I take a cable car from Fiesch to the check-in desk, aka Alpenlodge restaurant in Fiescheralp terminal. A woman hands me a key and a hamper of local meats and cheeses. She also gives me a business card. “If there’s a problem during the night, call us,” she says. A slight pause. “We’ll send a helicopter.” She guffaws.

At such moments a solitary stay at 2,800m seems a bit daft. Then you take the cable car up Eggishorn, step outside the terminal and see Cube Aletsch. It’s as five-star as a high-altitude cabin can be, with an expensive sofabed, a fridge holding a bottle of Prosecco and the requisite fluffy bathrobes and slippers in a basic bathroom. The front wall is made of insulated glass which glides open with the smoothness of precision Swiss engineering. There’s also a wooden hot tub on the deck.

They’ve clearly thrown money at the thing. Yet you barely notice. You’re too busy gawping at the view. 

At eye level beyond the deck is peak after snow-ribbed peak. The Aletsch glacier carves beneath, 11 billion tons of grey-blue ice – enough to provide one litre of drinking water for every person on the planet for more than four years – creaking for 13 miles from a distant valley head, around a bend below then west towards the Matterhorn. It’s an astonishing sight; almost ocular tinnitus in that you never quite get used to it.

By 5pm the last daytrippers leave and the summit becomes wilder, more elemental. When the sun rakes across the glacier, cracks shine like gold filigree. The Matterhorn becomes a perfect pyramid in a pale sky. 

I turn off my phone – the 4G up here is better than Berkshire – ease into the hot tub with a glass of fizz and goggle. Cube Aletsch is not so much a room with a view as a view with a room.

I’m finishing dinner on the deck later when the last clouds pull back like theatre curtains. Framed by the mountains’ black silhouettes, the sky boils with stars. The Milky Way is a cloudy stripe. Shooting stars blaze and die like sparks. In light pollution this minimal, the million stars tag undersells the thing.

I retreat inside the cabin when the temperature dips but am reluctant to sleep. The world’s most redundant curtains remain open all night. I wake periodically and watch constellations inch across the sky. 

Cube Aletsch is a highlight of Million Stars Hotel, as extraordinary as you’d hope. Could stay two costing a fraction of its price compare?  

Berginsel is a B&B on a dairy farm in Oberems, a pipsqueak village of sagging barns above the Rhone valley. After a splendid dinner of home-made raclette, Marie-Elisabeth (twinkly, with eyes the colour of alpine streams) shows me my room in a private garden behind the farmhouse.

Beneath a pine tree at the valley’s edge a double bed is made up with red gingham linen. Candles shimmer in lanterns. Villages twinkle far below. There’s a faint smell of fresh hay from adjacent fields. It’s less a room than Titania’s boudoir.

“This space has always had a special atmosphere,” Marie-Elisabeth says. “It’s where I come to ask the moon my questions.”

I know the question you’re wondering: lovely but what happens if it rains?

By 10pm, I’m in bed with a mug of mountain-herb tea. Within an hour, the wind is roaring in the pine boughs and a hanging lamp swings as if aboard a galleon. Thunder crackles, booms, rolls like a long echo far down the valley.

Then the rain began. I tried to tough it out for you, reader, I really did. But when drops seep through the boughs I call it quits and retreat to a bedroom set aside in the house. A million stars? I didn’t see one.

The strange thing is, it doesn’t matter. Most people spend 90 per cent of their lives indoors. Any project which aims to nudge us outside, to step away from screens and reconnect with the natural world, gets my vote. To be snug outside while Nature threw a tantrum was utterly thrilling; as memorable as my night in Cube Aletsch in its way.

I’m back outside for breakfast at 7am; chomping homemade muesli and cheeses, slugging coffee as church bells drift up from villages and cowbells thonk and the sun warms my bones. Now this, I think, is luxury.

How to do it

James Stewart was a guest of Switzerland Tourism (myswitzerland.com). Cube Aletsch costs from £176 a night B&B, Berginsel costs from £79 B&B. Both sleep two. Million Stars Hotel (millionstars.swisshotels.com) operates from May-October.