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.
Today we went skiing and snowboarding at Brighton, which is in Big Cottonwood Canyon. It was cool seeing the landscape transform and the temperature drop as we went from 4,300 feet (in Salt Lake City) to 8,755 feet (at the base of the mountain). Here are a few snaps from the road.
Shot on iPhone
For those of you who are long-time readers of this blog, you might remember that I do an annual ski and snowboard trip with a group of close friends from both Canada and the US. This year should technically be the 14th annual, but we took two years off during the pandemic (though some of us did meet up to ski), and so we’re referring to this as the official 12th annual. The last one was in February 2020 in Fernie, BC, and this weekend we’re off to Park City, Utah.
This annual trip is something that I look forward to all year. And it has really cemented my love of snowboarding and the mountains. For me, it’s this wonderful combination of outdoor activity, beautiful landscapes, unplugging, and catching up with friends that I have known, in many cases, for over 20 years. In fact, I know that this trip is the reason that a few of us decided to get together to build Parkview Mountain House (our upcoming “creative mountain retreat” in Park City).
A big part of what we want to do with the house (when it’s hopefully ready next winter) is share our love of the mountains with others. We want others to experience what we experience when we go on these trips. At the same time, we felt like there was a huge gap in the market. Park City is a world-renowned ski and snowboard destination, and yet it still feels hard to find modern and design-focused places to stay. So we decided to create our own.
There is, however, one small problem: my right knee. It has been bothering me for the last few years whenever I snowboard, and usually only when I snowboard, to the point where I have to get off the mountain. This obviously pisses me off. So I decided to spend the last 2 months training my tender knees with Noah Mandel. We’ll see if that did anything this weekend. But I’m so committed to the mountains that, if it helps, I’m even prepared to switch to skiing!
Some of you may be aware that Globizen is working on a new project in Park City, Utah right now called the Parkview Mountain House.
It was first announced on the Globizen Journal back in the summer and then a later announcement was made appointing New York-based Mattaforma as the project architect. It’s kind of a great story because Mattaforma is a relatively new firm that was formed by two architects who used to be at Studio Gang. So we have a long history of working together.
The vision for the project is a creative retreat in the mountains. A place to unplug, be active, and hopefully a place to foster creative expression, whatever that may be for you. It was inspired by the trip that I have been making to the mountains each year where we try and do exactly this. It’s one of my favorite times of the year and one that I look forward to the minute the last one is over.
The team has just finished the schematic design phase for the house (see above axonometric). And we are now working through some of the structural and geotechnical issues that come with building in the mountains on very steep terrain.
To give you all one example, we had initially contemplated large multi-storey retaining walls to hold back the earth and embed the house into the side of the mountain. But that is now being changed to a stepped foundation that minimizes the amount of excavation and reduces each retaining wall to no more than a single storey. This move will also result in more wood and less concrete. It has been a fun learning process.
The creative retreat concept has also been evolving and we recently decided to make digital NFT art an integral part of the experience. We have a few collections that we have been stocking up on, but if any of you have any recommendations we are, of course, all ears.
Once the floor plans have been finalized, they’ll be posted up on the Globizen Journal. So make sure to e-mail subscribe and follow along on Instagram at @parkviewhousepc.
About 60 miles north of Salt Lake City is the largest ski resort in America, called Summit Powder Mountain. It’s some 10,000 acres. But beyond just being big, there is also a fascinating story and philosophy behind the mountain.
It was started by four partners — Elliott Bisnow (of Bisnow events), Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal and Jeremy Schwartz — who partnered up with Learn Capital in 2013 to buy the mountain from a distressed seller for $40 million.
The four guys were already running a successful invitation-only event series for entrepreneurs and creative types called the Summit Series, and big part of their vision for the mountain was to recreate this same ethos.
The idea was to create a community focused on relationship-building, entrepreneurship, innovation, environmental sustainability, and good design. Put differently: a kind of utopia for rich people.
So far, about 80% of the home buyers at Summit Powder Mountain are members of the Summit Series.
All of this has translated into some pretty cool mountain architecture (see above). In fact, people who buy vacant lots within the community are effectively banned from building the kind of faux chalet stuff that permeates a lot of (or most?) mountain towns.
Here is a taste of some of the homes that have already been built.
New York-based Extell Development is, according to this recent WSJ article, in the midst of trying to build a $2 billion full-service ski and snowboard resort near Park City, Utah. It would be the first new resort in the United States in about four decades. These things are, clearly, difficult to get approved, and the fundamentals are, arguably, not all that great. In the early 1990s, the US had about 546 ski and snowboard resorts across the country. As of the 2018-2019 season that number had dropped to 476, according to the WSJ. People are skiing less than they used it, it would seem.
To be a bit more precise on its location, the proposed resort, which is currently called Mayflower Mountain Resort, is to be located next to Deer Valley Resort. And there’s even a plan floating around to possibly merge the two resorts. That’s apparently what the county planners want. I’m not all that familiar with Deer Valley because they don’t allow my kind there (snowboarders). But it’s an exclusive resort with a country-club kind of feel (or so I’m told). So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the proposed merger doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of traction with the patrons of Deer Valley.
But here’s the interesting thing about the Mayflower site. It’s generally controlled (to what extent, I don’t exactly know) by an entity called The Military Installation Development Authority. And this entity has the power to do things like issue bonds and grant certain land-use approvals. This means that there may be an angle to streamline the approvals process (i.e. make this project actually feasible) and to leverage things like tax increment financing (TIF) in order to fund the project.
Supposedly a new mountain resort has been on the books for this site for some 30 years. Could now finally be the time? If they allow my kind, you can count me in.
Image: WSJ
I’ve never been to Whitefish, Montana, but it is on my list (mostly to try out the snowboarding). I have also been following a home in Whitefish that was designed and built by Alex Strohl and Andrea Dabene called the Nooq. I like to periodically dream about living in the mountains and this home is the sort of thing that usually comes to mind.
Take a look at the home’s Instagram page and you’ll see that every detail has been carefully considered. Each bathroom, for example, has a different tile color — all of which are meant to mimic the color palette of Montana throughout the year. As I’ve said before on the blog, that’s one of the things that you want from good design — you want to know that somebody thought about things.
They have also recently made the home available for rent on Airbnb. But the listing is private. So if you’d like to learn more, you’ll have to drop your email address over here. I may just have to do that once winter rolls around.
