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LIVING & TRAVEL Verbier And The Self-Made Millionaire by steve mencher

Miles Anderson* ducks as I try to take his picture. I want a shot of the dapper and supremely confident American expat who owns the ten million dollar house on the hill, but I suppose he feels too exposed. Instead, I snap a shot of a young man in a hot pink parapente as he glides by the deck on his way down into the lush valley below. For Anderson and his family, Verbier is now home. Anderson was opening up the Eastern European territory for Hewlett Packard from a base in Geneva when he and his wife discovered Verbier in 1972. They're both from the state of Washington and love the mountains. He's such an efficient guy he drew a circle around Geneva to find a town they could get to in 90 minutes for skiing. The line bisected Verbier, 100 miles away. "We started day-skiing, and eventually stayed for a week's vacation. Then one day, if you can afford it, you say, let's rent something. We kept sinking in. The dog learned how to ride the bus in town. That was it. We couldn't escape once the dog was committed."

Verbier, Switzerland: Rich Man, Poor Man Verbier On Nearly No Dollars A Day Verbier Straight Up

A hundred families in the neighboring chalets have stories like Anderson's, he says. They make their home in Switzerland because it's at the crossroads of international business, and they have a place in Verbier because it has some of the best skiing in the world. "If you wander around here and talk to people doing this, they're just back from Hong Kong, or they're just on their way to Novosibirsk, because we're making a living on a multinational basis." Anderson is Vice-Chairman and President of International Operations at a bio-medical company. "Although we all dream of having our own herd of cows, and staying right in the Valley and making our own cheese." Miles Anderson says you can throw the best dinner parties in Verbier. You have to plan your itinerary carefully, but if you pick up your pasta in Italy when the stores open and then head out for your wine and cheese in France, you can get some special dried beef on your way back home and still be in the kitchen in plenty of time to cook. Of course, they eat later in Switzerland, but you get the idea. "Now look over there, the herd of black cows is just coming down the hill from the barn. It looks like they're headed to the golf course," Anderson says, laughing. * Names have been changed to protect the rich. Steve Mencher is a former producer for National Public Radio, and a charter member of the Acme Content Providers of Washington, D.C. Illustrations by Federico Jordan, a freelance illustrator based in Mexico. © 1996 Tripod, Inc. All Rights Reserved.