The evolving Avoriaz’s image (Part Two)

The reindeer as Avoriaz mascots were short lived when it was realized that they couldn’t find good sustenance and climate in Avoriaz, in fact a few ran away and had to be wrestled back from nearby Switerland. At the same time, as the resort grew in popularity, a switch has to be made to horse-drawn sleigh from the valley with their owner-conductors. 

That explain why the reindeer logo was dropped, even though the visual could have been switch to stylized silhouettes of skiers, snowboarders, mountain climbers, mountain bike riders, etc, as they exist Olympic-style. 

In addition, the local ski school caved in from the French ski instructor syndicate to adopt their national uniform, the town of Morzine forced also the issue of merging its name with Avoriaz creating a new logo and jettisoned all the previous Avoriaz specific branding. 

The “Festival du Film Fantastique” (Sci-Fi film festival) was also a flimsy attempt to attract the French celebrities to the resort and lost it reason of being as the lodging grew but not in terms of quality and amenities that well-to-do skiers were looking for. 

In the process, Avoriaz became the perfect product tour operators were looking for, sacrificing the more ritzy type of clientele targeted initially, thus accelerating the stagnation of its lodging quality that was quickly no longer in line with a more affluent clientele’s expectation. 

It’s also that Avoriaz found itself diluted with the giant interconnect “Portes de Soleil” that also blurred its unique image. The “British invasion” spurred by Easy Jet creating a hub in Geneva over the ashes of Swissair didn’t help either, bringing herds of loud and young kids to the mountain. 

With more care and a more robust strategy, Avoriaz could have remained a ski resort like Courchevel or St. Moritz in Switzerland, but the appeal of a quick, easy buck is probably what persuaded developer Gérard Brémond to change course and go with mass tourism (including Club Med) and alter his initial plans, so the rest is now history...

The evolving Avoriaz’s image (Part One)

From its inception in 1963, the French ski resort of Avoriaz had a very strong and very distinct branding that really placed it ahead of its times from a marketing standpoint. This was later abandoned by plain laziness, lack of good thinking and proper decision-making, but this is just my opinion. 

What remains true is that Avoriaz’s original branding was anchored in its avant-garde architecture, being entirely car-free, and promoting a skier’s hideaway or aerie (repère de skieurs) with its location over a cliff promontory and the exotic, albeit gratuitous reindeer-drawn sleigh as part of its logo. 

It’s widely believed that the first logo, depicting the stylized reindeer was designed in the mid-1960s under the direction of Gérard Brémond, Avoriaz developer. Unlike traditional resorts that outsourced their communication to external agencies, 

Avoriaz's initial graphic identity was created directly within the Avoriaz Architecture Studio (led by Jacques Labro, Jean-Jacques Orzoni, and Jean-Marc Roques). The choice of the reindeer, was a bit of a fluke and it stemmed directly from the concept of a 100% pedestrian-friendly resort. In 1966, to ensure transfers on the car-free slopes, Gérard Brémond brought real reindeer from Lapland to pull the few sleds available and that’s the reason why the animal thus became the resort's immediate graphic symbol. 

The original design played on visual ambiguity as the clean, geometric lines of the animal's antlers were drawn asymmetrically to directly echo the broken lines and silhouette of the resort's first buildings (Hôtel des Dromonts). A few years later, for advertising posters and graphic variations, they used graphic artists to refine and solidify this unique and avant-garde visual identity. 

The branding treatment was mirroring Avoriaz modernity like no other ski resort. The personnel even wore black and orange uniforms! One key Avoriaz employee, the late François Fallin, became a critical artist who tirelessly hand-painted most of the ski resort signage in white lettering bordered by a yellow and orange stripe with rounded corners keeping branding consistent and unique for many years…

Tomorrow, we’ll see why Avoriaz branding has devolved and what should have done instead...

Watching the Eurovision Song Contest

The last Eurovision contest I might have seen happened sometime between 1967 and 1975, but it’s not quite clear to me. Since my parents only got a TV in 1967, it had to be at that time that I began to watch the show. 

Before that I knew that the Italian singer Gigliola Cinquetti had won the 1964 Contest for Italy with her song "Non ho l'età". She was followed by France Gall in 1965 with "Poupée de cire, poupée de son" but after that my memory gets blurry and I might have watched the 1967, 1968 and maybe some other Contests before I moved to America in 1977, but I can’t really remember. 

Did I even see ABBA’s Waterloo in 1974, I’m not quite sure. I simply thought I enjoyed watching the few shows I had a chance to see when I was young and into pop culture, but since then the Eurovision Song Contest moved out of my musical environment. 

It was until last weekend when I watched a good portion of the 70th Contest in Vienna that I could appreciate what the 2026 version was bringing to the public through YouTube for the first time. I wasn’t thrilled with all the “engineered” and overproduced songs that failed to make me want to watch next year’s program. 

I would say that Bulgarian singer Dara who won this year’s contest with her party anthem "Bangaranga", had the least bad performance of the show, but that doesn’t say much. She beat out Israel's Noam Bettan, which I thought was really bad and Australia's Delta Goodrem, who placed second and third, respectively. 

Like many, I wondered why Australia was even part of Eurovision, but it’s allegedly because the down-under country loves that show and of the longstanding broadcast efforts of the Australian network SBS, which has aired the event since 1983. Now, you know everything about me and the Eurovision song competition! 

Break in solar electricity production

Unbeknownst to us, our solar inverter broke down on March 16. The inverter is a critical component that converts direct current (DC) electricity produced by solar panels into alternating current (AC), which is used by our home and sends the excess to the utility grid. It functions as the "brain" of the system, enabling, managing, and monitoring electricity usage. 

I should have known it if I had looked at my app telling me about the functionality of our solar electricity production, but I was simply assuming that all was well. It’s just in April that I checked it and realized that nothing was going on, then, a few days later I got the monthly bill from the power company telling me that I was owing three times the amount I normally paid when my solar system worked. 

I called the company that installed the system and ten days later they came to replace the faulty inverter and restore the natural cycle fed by our indefatigable sun. For those of you considering installing solar panels, be aware that there are two ways to convert current, one with a central inverter like ours or one smaller inverter per panel (a much better idea because it’s preferable to have one panel done instead of the entire system!) 

Now we’re back in full production and thanking the sun, our solar device and the human brains that have thought about that power conversion and made it such a practical and useful invention!

My veggie garden

Our vegetable garden is 250 square feet small, but still represents some real work to set it up and aerate early season, fence and feed it as well as irrigate it regularly during our long and sometimes hot summers. So are all these efforts really worth it? 

For the moment, I’d say yes, but I’m not sure that’s quite true given all the hard work and expenses involved. So what am I hoping to get with continuing this gardening habit of ours that started some 20 years ago? 

For one thing, crop diversity isn’t a priority, as we focus on lettuce, strawberries and herbs given the small area we’re dealing with and the mountain’s rather brief growing season. 

Still what we get is fantastically fresh and tasting good, plus we know what made it grow and we enjoy caring for our tiny crops and harvesting them. 

I’ve also learned patience through tending a veggie garden as there aren’t many shortcuts available but letting time, sunshine and enough water work their way as we would expect them to. So, even if our lettuce, parsley, rosemary and strawberry are far from cheap, we value them for being ours and very tasty, so that’s why I decided yesterday that, God willing, I’ll continue tending our veggie garden until I turn 80…

The extra effort

It is amazing how sometimes, when we’re seemingly tired and are done for the day, a little extra effort can accomplish and for certainty, will add up in what we accomplished. I was reminded of it a few days ago as I was aerating our veggie garden, a yearly chore that I loathe. 

If I were putting my mind to it, I could still find mental and physical resources that would add up to a lot and make a huge difference in the job produced. I disregarded my internal calls for indulging into self-satisfaction and self-praise and leaving the job at a level substantially and quantitatively lower, but somehow mustered the resources to produce that magical extra effort. 

Was it the remnant of a habit I had observed in my family when I was a kid or that I have instinctively maintained throughout my adult life? Quite possibly, but it was still there to give me a head-start the next day when I would return to that job. I was just amazed about it and perhaps that amazement was amply justified. It made me realize that this “extra effort” is rarely about strength. 

It’s about intention. It’s about that quiet decision to lean in rather than step back, even when no one is watching and no one will praise us for it. And perhaps that is why it feels so strangely satisfying: because it reconnects us with a part of ourselves that refuses to settle for the minimum. Is it also a form of guilt? Quite possibly. A part of us that still believes in doing things well, not for recognition, but because it shapes who we are and want to stay. 

As I grow older, I’m increasingly aware that these small choices accumulate. They become a kind of personal signature — the way we show up in the world, even in the most mundane tasks. Maybe that’s why the moment struck me as it reminded me that I’m still capable of that little surge of purpose, that quiet insistence on doing things properly. 

And that, in itself, felt like a gift. In the end, the extra effort wasn’t about the veggie garden at all. It was about remembering that there is always a little more inside us than we think — a reserve we only discover when we choose to reach for it.

The “2cv mentality”

Believe it or not, I’ve learned an awful lot from owning and driving a Citroen 2cv. 

It made me an efficiency freak with its undepowered, smartly engineered and inspiring design, literally from top to bottom. 

All life long it has made me longing for efficiency in all kinds of domains, from house design, to all kinds of objects and devices and has made me a much better consumer while developing in me an unending quest for the best ratio between design and performance. 

It’s been a catalyst of sort for me, like many other objects or situations can be for many others. 

Thank you, lowly 2cv!