For Perriand, it was paramount her buildings worked in harmony with the local landscape and “didn’t pollute the view” or damage the nature she loved so much. Instead of sprawling low-rise apartments or faux-traditional chalets, she built upwards to minimise the environmental impact; the resorts were originally designed as car-free. She wanted each block to hold a lot of people and for every flat to be simple but identical, with big windows offering the same epic quality of view, with an equal amount of sunlight, for every occupant, not just the ones paying for the penthouse.

It’s a concept that seems revolutionary compared to today, where the big money always gets the best views and the finest apartments, in ski resorts but also everywhere. Perriand’s utopian vision and noble ambition harks back to a time when the majority of people could feel optimistic about the future, not just those at the top of the pyramid.

“She wanted each person to have their own piece of mountain,” local historian Jean-Marie Chevronnet tells me during one of the resort’s insightful guided Archi Ski tours. “She had an egalitarian philosophy and her idea of luxury was that it was not something expensive, it was a great view of nature. She wanted to enhance that connection between people from the towns and the mountains. The apartments were small with minimal decoration inside as the main attraction was the landscape outside.”

Though perhaps unsurprisingly the resort has had to add some bigger and more bling apartments and chalets on other sites to satisfy those who want more than just a functional space where the nature is front and centre. The same people who can now buy a more expensive lift pass, so they get to jump the queue, and ride the line which just used to be available for ski schools. It’s hard to imagine Charlotte Perriand being massively happy with that but such is the changing world.

And there are plenty of resorts far more swanky and elitist than Les Arcs, which offers subsidies for locals, and has decent value deals through operators such as Action Outdoors. Plus, it has such good freeride terrain it will always draw the best snowboarders and skiers in Europe, helping to keep that down-to-earth but also awestruck-by-nature vibe about the place that Perriand herself felt so keenly.

She would really like the environmental efforts the resort is making to minimise its impact and reduce its carbon footprint too, such as the electric funicular, which brings you up from the train station at Bourg St Maurice in just seven minutes making the resort super-easy to reach by train from the UK, Holland, Belgium and of course France. 60 per cent of the resort now runs on renewable energy, they use solar panels extensively, have bee hives everywhere, and adhere to strict laws on protecting the local biodiversity. Some of the piste groomers even run on natural gas.

Getting as many people as possible out to the mountains and deep into nature is important. Not just for our mental and physical health, though it’s obviously great for both those things. But it matters because the more time we spend in the natural world, the more we witness how fragile and precious it is, and the more passionately we feel about wanting to protect it. A sentiment that could not be more important as the climate crisis deepens, and another idea Charlotte Perriand was way ahead of her time in envisioning.