Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Category: Park City / Utah

  • Parkview Mountain House is now open for winter 2026/2027 bookings

    I’m in Park City right now working à distance, hanging with the family, and puttering around Parkview Mountain House in the evenings preparing for this winter season. I’m now excited to announce that PMH is officially open for winter 2026/2027 bookings! Here’s our website and here’s the direct link to our Airbnb listing.

    Now the important question: Will it be an epic winter with lots of snowpack?

    The honest answer is I don’t know, but the El Niño weather pattern in the Pacific is, as I understand it, a promising precondition. In fact, Ski Utah even launched a “Vote Super El Niño” campaign ahead of this year’s US elections. Maybe that was more just for fun.

    Regardless, there is actually a science behind Utah’s title of “The Greatest Snow on Earth.” I even bought a book on it, got deep into snow, and blogged about it here. Based on this cursory knowledge, I’m optimistic that this year is going to be a good one.

    Whenever I tell people about PMH, I’m often asked: Why Utah? And the obvious answer is the snow. But it’s also one of the most accessible ski towns. There are nearly a dozen resorts within an hour’s drive of SLC airport, and PMH itself is 27 minutes from the terminal.

    On this trip, we checked out Sundance Resort for the first time. Previously the Timp Haven resort, actor Robert Redford bought it in 1968 and renamed it the Sundance Mountain Resort, after his film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

    I can’t speak to the mountain itself, but Bianca and I were both super impressed by the resort and the vibe. It has an elevated feel, and it’s clearly very popular throughout the year. We tried to have dinner there, but the restaurant was fully booked. So instead we bought a Sundance sweater for Vivienne. Now I can’t wait to snowboard there. (It’s a 50-minute drive from PMH.)

    If you like skiing and snowboarding or baby Sundance sweaters and want to visit Utah, you can check out Parkview Mountain House here.

    House photo by PMH creative resident Ryan Schwartz

  • Park City to Moab

    Shot on Fujifilm X-T3 (23mm)

  • Living at 2,100 metres

    Parkview Mountain House is situated at around 2,100 m in elevation in Park City, Utah. To put this into context, Denver is the “Mile-High City” which means it’s only 1,609 m in elevation (or 5,280 feet because, for whatever odd reason, that’s how many feet are in a mile — and, yes, the US should adopt the metric system already).

    There are only so many major cities that sit in or above this bracket. Mexico City is about 2,240 m, Bogotá, Colombia is about 2,620 m, and La Paz, Bolivia is about 3,640 m, which gives it the title of the highest capital city.

    But I digress. The neat thing about where PMH is located in Park City is that you can walk about 10 minutes up the street and you’re at the Parkview Trailhead with easy access to hikes ranging from 45 minutes to a few hours. This is such a novelty to me.

    I’ve never done it, but lots of backcountry skiers and boarders also skin up in the winter to get in powder turns away from the crowds. One day I will try this. There’s barely any parking here, though, so walking from the house is a nice feature.

    Here’s a list of the best trails in the area via AllTrails.

  • What’s next for Parkview Mountain House

    Since we first opened bookings for Parkview Mountain House, we have been using a third-party property manager. This seemed to make the most sense given our team is not local.

    But since then, we have learned that, along with the fees charged by Airbnb and VRBO, it’s simply too high a fee load. We also found it difficult to offer the exact hospitality experience we were after without full management control.

    So we have made the decision to terminate our management contract and transition the property to internalized management. What this will entail is taking on more management control (from Toronto) and having a local support team that we assemble and manage ourselves. This is underway and I’m personally enjoying getting further into the details of this business.

    What does this mean for bookings?

    Summer and fall remain open for bookings. But the winter season is now blocked off starting in early December. Expect an announcement this fall when it opens up. To stay in the loop, you can subscribe to this blog and also check off “Globizen Updates.”

    Are you local to Park City and SLC?

    In the meantime, if any of you live in the area and work in the hospitality, maintenance, or property management space, please drop us a line at pmh@globizen.com. We are currently assembling our local vendor team and we’d love to connect with you.

    I have a good feeling that it’s going to be an incredible winter season in Utah.

  • The richest person in Utah wants to buy the largest ski resort in the US

    June 10, 2026 · View original

    The richest person in Utah is a man named Matthew Prince. Prince, who grew up in Park City and was once a ski instructor at Park City Mountain Resort, is the co-founder of a tech company called Cloudflare. I’m assuming his riches came from the tech company and not from being a ski instructor. But he still seems to like skiing because he’s been mounting a highly public and aggressive campaign to buy the resort from Vail.

    There is a narrative in the ski and snowboard community that Vail has destroyed the industry through poor management, expensive lift tickets, homogeneity, and just an overall loss of what the vibe used to be. The market may also agree with this narrative because Vail’s stock price is down nearly 60% over the last five years.

    So Prince’s message to Vail is “you’re a bad capital allocator” and his pitch to the Park City community is one that sounds really nice. It’s basically a community-first rescue mission. He has promised zero personal profit of any kind (he apparently has enough money), pledged to reinvest 100% of the resort’s profits into infrastructure upgrades and employee compensation, and floated ambitious ideas to build a massive gondola network connecting Main Street Park City to some of the neighbouring canyons (which would be totally awesome).

    Vail’s response continues to be that the resort is absolutely not for sale. But Prince is trying to encourage them to adopt a more asset-light model, where they control the brand and the Epic Pass, and local billionaires like Prince run the physical properties.

    To provide a bit of real estate context here, Vail owns the mountain infrastructure, the snowmaking equipment, and the overall business operations, but much of the resort sits on land owned by Toronto-based Talisker. My understanding is that the land lease gives Vail all the practical indications of ownership for a very long time, but I thought I would explain this nuance given that we like to talk about real estate specifics on this blog.

    I have no idea where this public pursuit will go, and I know nothing about Prince’s values as an individual, but the story is certainly compelling. There’s something to be said for a rich local wanting to buy a resort just for the love of skiing.

    Cover photo by Patrick T’Kindt on Unsplash

  • Parkview Mountain House featured in Monocle

    March 4, 2026 · View original

    The March issue of Monocle just dropped, debuting a new format called the Monocle 100. It’s a list of the people, places, and things worth knowing about. And in the middle of it is something called the Monocle Property Survey, which was deliberately timed to coincide with MIPIM, the massive real estate conference that takes place every March in Cannes.

    As a quick aside, our team contemplated going to MIPIM this year in search of both friends and money, but then we thought to ourselves: Why bother going to the South of France when we have Toronto in the middle of March to enjoy?

    The first thing the Property Survey does is give a rare nod to developers: “While architects often nab all the credit for building our cities, streets and homes, it’s actually developers who should get much of the kudos (and blame, in some instances). Because it’s usually developers — small, large, private, state-funded — that must secure land, raise capital and take risks.” It almost feels weird hearing somebody say something positive about our kind.

    But even better, the survey includes a full page on our unique creative residency program at Parkview Mountain House (Park City, Utah):

    A big thanks to the Monocle team for the feature. If you’re in Toronto and would like to pickup a copy of this month’s issue, visit their shop in Little Italy at 776 College Street. And if you’d like to learn more about PMH, including our creative residency program, visit pmhpc.com.

  • Salt Lake City proposes new small lot development ordinance

    February 23, 2026 · View original

    One of the big housing trends that we have seen across North America over the last several years is the push to allow greater supply in low-rise neighbourhoods.

    Here in Toronto, this has come through a well-known program called Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods (or EHON), which I believe launched around 2020. But you can find countless similar programs in other cities.

    Salt Lake City, for example, is currently looking at updating its single-family exclusive zoning) to allow for “gentle infill opportunities” on smaller lots. The zones under consideration cover 77% of the land zoned for residential in SLC. And interestingly enough, this program is also called Expanding Housing Options.

    In their case, they are proposing to create a new definition for “Small Lot Dwellings,” which would, among other things, reduce the minimum lot area per dwelling to 2,000 sf, reduce the number of required off-street parking spaces from 2 to 1 per dwelling, and allow up to four homes per lot via fourplexes and townhomes.

    One of the things that I found interesting about their proposed policies is that they seem to explicitly encourage “sideways” multiplexes and row houses like this:

    This starts to tell you something about the scale of SLC’s urban fabric, even though there are no dimensions on this conceptual site plan. These are big lots.

    Despite sometimes having the same moniker, cities are responding to their urban contexts in different ways. SLC uses explicit density math: at least 2,000 sf of site area per dwelling. Whereas Toronto increasingly relies on built-form standards: here’s the envelope you can build, if you can fit a fourplex within it (or a sixplex in certain wards), go for it. And don’t worry about parking.

    If Toronto mandated one parking space per dwelling unit, virtually no multiplexes would ever get built in the city. Our lot sizes simply don’t allow for it. Moving away from the car is also the only way that Toronto will be able to continue to grow and scale up.

    Despite these local nuances, the overall ambition remains the same. Low-rise neighbourhoods across North America are being asked to house more people on the same amount of land, and that’s a positive step forward.

    Cover photo by Ashton Bingham on Unsplash

    Map and planning diagrams from Salt Lake City Planning Division

  • 15th annual

    Plus, Extell and Hilton announce new Waldorf Astoria in Park City

    January 28, 2026 · View original

    Whistler is out, the Interior of BC is in. Huge real estate deals are out, powder chasing is in. If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you’ll know that I do a ski and snowboard trip with a group of friends each year around this time.

    Our last three trips were to Park City (where it snowed so much we lost power); Trois Vallées (which also served as my bachelor party and which involved equal parts snowboarding and dancing on tables); and Hokkaido (where it looked like Toronto looks right now).

    This year — for annual number fifteen — we’re headed to Revelstoke and Kicking Horse in the Selkirk and Purcell Mountains.

    On some trips we like to combine an urban trip with the mountains, so that we can also gawk at architecture and urbanism. That’s what we did in Japan last year. But this year’s trip is not about that. It’s about unadulterated time in the mountains.

    It has been a weird season for snow. The west coast has been too warm with not enough of it, and the east coast has been too cold with unusual amounts of it. I have no idea what’s in store for us this week, but here’s to hoping it looks like the cover photo of this post.

    In some related real estate news, Extell Development Company and Hilton just announced that they’ll be opening a Waldorf Astoria Resort and Residences in the new Deer Valley East Village.

    It’s going to have 132 hotel keys and 105 one- to six-bedroom branded residences ranging from 1,099 to 5,155 square feet. Of the 105 branded residences, 56 will be “hotel residences” located above the hotel, and the remaining 49 residences will be in a more exclusive standalone residential building.

    Architecture for the project is by KPF and the interiors are by AvroKO.

    If you missed my recent post about the East Village and the new Four Seasons that is also currently under construction, click here.

    Cover photo by Zach Wear on Unsplash

  • Thoughts on the new Deer Valley Four Seasons

    Spoiler: It’s not for me

    January 18, 2026 · View original

    New York-based Extell Development is currently under construction on a Four Seasons Resort and Private Residences in the new Deer Valley East Village in Utah. When I was there in December, Bianca and I went by to check out the overall progress in the village, and the crew was in the midst of laying the decking for the ground floor. ODA designed the architecture, interiors, and landscaping.

    The residential offering consists of Private Residences and Hotel Residences. The former are located in an owner-exclusive building and the latter are in the hotel building, where the units can be put into the Four Seasons Rental Program. I’m not sure if this is indicative of their overall inventory, but the remaining Hotel Residences are meaningfully larger than the Private Residences.

    Based on current availability, the smallest remaining Private Residence (1,553 sf) is going for US$3,283 psf.

    As a Park City booster, I think this additional village is exciting. There are now two large interconnected resorts and four distinct villages lining the Wasatch Back: Park City Mountain Resort, Park City Canyons Village, Deer Valley, and the Deer Valley East Village. Visit Utah would say that there’s also a third resort in Woodward Park City (which happens to be adjacent to Parkview Mountain House).

    But as a real estate developer and snowboarder, I do wonder about two things.

    First, Deer Valley East Village is located in an area on the Wasatch Back that receives noticeably less snow compared to other areas because of its lower elevation and broad east exposure. If I refer back to Jim Steenburgh’s book, Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth, the average annual snowfall at the base of the Jordanelle Gondola (located just north of the East Village) is probably less than 150 inches. This compares to 350+ inches at higher elevations in Park City and 500+ inches in the Cottonwood Canyons.

    Because of this, the East Village has obviously invested heavily in snowmaking equipment. But artificial snow is not the same as natural snow. The higher elevations will be just fine, but the lower elevations will likely see marginal conditions. So why build a new village here? And was and is this a consideration for buyers at this new Four Seasons? Or are the luxury amenities and après events the real deciding factors? I’m not their target demographic, but from my perspective, this is reason enough not to buy here.

    On the topic of the target buyer, my second question is about Deer Valley’s “no snowboarding” rule (which is another reason why I’m not their target demographic). There are only 3 resorts in the United States that ban snowboarding. One of them is Deer Valley, and the other two are Alta (Utah) and Mad River Glen (Vermont). This seems to be a wildly popular rule among resort guests, and I support Deer Valley’s decision to weed out “riff-raff” like me. Deer Valley is also known for capping daily lift tickets to keep the crowds down, so they don’t seem to be hurting for patrons.

    But according to recent data from Snowsports Industries America (SIA), the rough participation split in the US between skiers and snowboarders is somewhere around 60-70% and 30-40%, respectively. There are also many instances where families have a mix of skiers and snowboarders. If you’re the Four Seasons at Deer Valley, this segment of the market is excluded. Oh well. The rich snowboarders have Park City, The Colony at Canyons Village, Powder Mountain, Aspen, and many other locations.

    My assumption is that the ban on snowboarders is an unapologetic feature of Deer Valley and developments like the Four Seasons. It creates an air of exclusivity and differentiation. Some data also suggests that snowboarders tend to be a more ethnically diverse group compared to skiers (SIA reports show that among female snowboarders, 25% are Hispanic, and among males, 13% are Black — the highest diversity rates in winter sports), so one could argue that it’s not just about the type of device used to get down the mountain. And, it seems to be working.

    In July 2025, the Extell announced that they had closed a $600 million construction loan for the project from JVP Management and that 60% of the hotel residences were already sold. This is believed to be the largest construction loan on record for a hotel and residential condominium project in Utah.

    At the same time, I’m also certain that the Four Seasons lost sales to certain buyers, perhaps a wealthy Boomer or Gen Xer with kids or grandkids who snowboard. Extrapolating this demographic trend, it is also believed that Millennials represent the first generation in the US with near-parity between skiers and snowboarders. So what will this mean for luxury real estate as these Millennials become the dominant buyer segment? My prediction is that the real estate market will respond.

    Would you buy at the Deer Valley Four Seasons? Or have you already?

    Cover photo: Deer Valley Four Seasons

  • From Chicago to Park City

    How Utah architect John Sugden reinvented the International Style for the mountains

    December 21, 2025 · View original

    John Sugden (1922-2003) was one of the most important Utah architects of the 20th century. Born in Chicago in 1922, he studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) under the legendary Mies van der Rohe, and worked at Mies’s firm from 1945 to 1952 before moving to Utah.

    For those who may not be familiar, Mies is a big deal in the architectural community. Some of his most noteworthy projects include the Farnsworth House (which hosted a 100th anniversary collaboration between Braun and the late Virgil Abloh in 2021); the Barcelona Pavilion (and its accompanying chair); Crown Hall at IIT (which is high on my list of buildings to visit); the Seagram Building in New York; and, of course, the Toronto-Dominion Centre complex.

    Sugden moved to Utah in 1952. He would then spend the rest of his career defining what the International Style — a major architectural movement that dominated modernism from the 1920s to the 1970s — could be in a mountain context, while educating the next generation of architects at the University of Utah’s Graduate School of Architecture.

    His first major project in Utah was a house for his mother: the Roberta Sugden House in Salt Lake City (1955). It is a classic steel-and-glass structure that takes obvious cues from the Farnsworth House but that was adapted to the Utah landscape. Today, it remains an icon of Mid-Century Modernism in the city.

    His own home and studio followed in 1984. Referred to as “The Glass Cube,” or the Mountain House Studio, it is located in Park City (just down the street from Parkview Mountain House in Summit Park). A perfect 33 x 33 x 33 foot cube, the home marks an important turning point for architecture and design in the area.

    By the 1980s, modernism had entered into a mid-life crisis in urban settings. Architects and designers were beginning to reject its austerity and lack of ornamentation in favor of a new movement: Postmodernism.

    But in the Wasatch Mountains, and outside of perhaps only Aspen, the International Style had yet to truly make its mark. Mountain homes simply did not look like this; they were heavy and rustic, and they had gabled roofs. Sugden changed that. His home/studio was the opposite of this: light, transparent, flat-roofed, and industrial in its orientation.

    It’s also worth mentioning that the construction of the Glass Cube roughly aligns with the rebirth of Park City. By the early 1950s, it was a dying ghost town in the mountains. Many of the silver mines that had made it a wealthy place at the end of the 19th century had already shuttered, and the city was without an economic purpose.

    The first ski operations opened in 1963 under the banner of Treasure Mountain Resort. However, it was a makeshift operation, and it would not be until 1971 that Aspen-developer Edgar Stern would acquire Treasure and transform it into Park City Mountain Resort.

    By 1974, he had successfully lured the US Alpine Ski Team to the city. And by 1981, he had moved on to even grander ambitions with the opening of his latest project down the street: Deer Valley Resort. It was also around this time (1982) that Toronto-based Noranda stopped all work and closed the last mining operations in the city.

    Then came Sugden’s modernist Glass Cube in 1984.

    Today, the Summit Park area is filled with countless new and under-construction modern homes, designed by award-winning firms such as Klima Architecture and Brach Design. No two homes are the same, and there’s a palpable willingness to experiment. It feels like an architectural playground, and I like to think that it all started with John Sugden’s simple glass cube.