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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Tag: park city

  • Cascading house in Park City lists for $29,000,000

    We were having pizza at Davanza’s the other night and I started flipping through one of those real estate magazines that you find scattered around places like Park City.

    Now, more often than not, when I come across a house listed for tens of millions of dollars, I usually look at it and think to myself, “okay, I know this is a really expensive home and it is likely that someone will want to buy it, but I objectively don’t like it.”

    However, as I was flipping through the magazine, I came across this listing and instead thought, “hey, this is actually a really cool house.”

    Designed by Wallace Cunningham, the 8,000 sf home features a cascading roof line that looks like an “S” in plan. (It also seems like all of the interior spaces were laid out in service of this plan design, which, depending on your own architectural proclivities, could be considered either a perfectly fine thing or an arbitrary thing.)

    It’s an interesting house. So here’s a video tour.

  • Big Cottonwood Canyon, Utah

    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

  • 12th annual

    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!

  • A few observations about Salt Lake City

    Utah is beautiful. See here.

    People in SLC are really nice. Strangers greet you on the street. Motorists are also more polite and patient. I had no idea how to respond. I suspect it might have something to do with there being less traffic and, in turn, less frustration. But again, even if you ignore what happens on the road, people are nice.

    You will need a serious utility vehicle to navigate the topography of this region. Venturing into the surrounding canyons requires 4-wheel drive or chains during snowstorms. I was only there for a week and already I have visions of a classic Defender in my mind. Do they come in electric versions?

    The streets are too wide for proper enjoyment as a pedestrian. This is a challenging problem to fix, as I have mentioned before. That said — and this is going to be an unpopular opinion — the city felt void of any sort of real traffic. The distances travelled are great, but the highways actually flow freely. You also never really need to worry about parking.

    Electric scooters are popular in SLC. As is cycling — both for getting around and as a reason to wear tight-fitting bright clothes.

    SLC feels as if it is both under the radar and also rapidly emerging. My new favorite restaurant in SLC is a place called Post Office Place. We walked in without a reservation on a Friday night and they gladly took us. I couldn’t understand why the place wasn’t rammed. I mean, they have Marseille-style panisse on the menu!

    The Granary District is an area to watch. It is a former industrial area to the southwest of downtown. It is already home to breweries, food halls, and creative offices. But it needs some more time to properly fill in. We stayed at the Evo Hotel in Granary (highly recommend). The campus amenities include a rock climbing facility, an indoor skatepark, and plenty of places to work and Zoom.

    Most of the new infill housing appears to be mid-rise in scale and most of it is wood-frame construction on top of concrete.

    By my estimation (and by estimation I mean that I have a spreadsheet for this), the ski and snowboard communities surrounding SLC are some of the most accessible in North America. Land at SLC airport and you’re in the mountains in 20-30 minutes.

    Park City-Canyons is the most well-known ski destination. But if you’re a more aggressive skier — the kind that keeps your gloves together with duct tape and counts the number of ski days per season — you’ll want to head over to the Cottonwood canyons and places like Snowbird and Brighton.

    Snowbird remains one of my all-time favorite ski destinations for two reasons: the mountain itself and the brutalist architecture at the bottom of it. There’s none of that faux alpine crap over here — just exposed and unabashed concrete and wood. And who doesn’t love brutalism, right? (I haven’t been to Brighton yet but one of my local friends told me that it’s a great snowboarders mountain.)

    The Canyons Village at Park City is developing really nicely. As I understand it, it’s only about 30-40% built out at this stage. The Pendry Hotel just recently opened (announcement here) and I can tell you that the restaurants were generally busy every night of the week (summer experience). The project team did a wonderful job creating a place and a new anchor in the village.

    What did I miss in this list?

  • New NFT collection — Utah

    Our week of working remotely in the mountains of Utah has come to an end. Being on mountain time meant early mornings every day. But it also meant being able to enjoy the evenings, including sunsets like the one shown here at the top of Ensign Peak. This was my first time really experiencing the Salt Lake City area in the summer, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. It is a beautiful place, and one that still feels under the radar once you exclude its global draw as a ski and snowboard destination. I also had a great time capturing it on my camera. So I’m excited to share my latest NFT photography collection — Utah. All of the photos were taken on my Fujifilm X-T3 (35mm) and can be viewed and purchased over here on Foundation.

  • Accessible modernism

    One of the most extraordinary things about Salt Lake City is that you can land at its airport and then, in 20-30 minutes, you’re in the mountains looking at landscapes like this:

    By my estimation, this makes it the most accessible big city and mountain town combination in North America.

    Historically though, Salt Lake City hasn’t really been known for modern architecture. There is, of course, one glaring exception and that is the work of architect John Sugden.

    Sugden was originally from Chicago, had trained under Mies van der Rohe, and is credited with bringing a similar kind of International Style to Utah.

    The house pictured above is one of Sugden’s projects.

    I’m not sure when it was originally built, but it was meticulously renovated by Brent Jespersen, and featured in Dwell magazine back in 2009. If you’d like to take a closer look, click here. (It is again being renovated right now.)

    When I was researching who in Salt Lake City and Park City was building cool stuff, Brent’s name immediately came up. So I appreciate him taking the time to tour me through some of his projects this evening. Thank you, Brent.

    What is now clear to me is that this whole not being known for modern architecture thing is quickly going away.

  • 📷 Park City in August

  • New KYIV city collection t-shirt

    At the beginning of this year, Globizen announced a new collection of city t-shirts. They have been very popular and we only have a few left from our original batch (which included some of the greatest places in the world: Toronto, Paris, and Park City). But we recently added a new city: Kyiv. This is obviously a really important one, and 100% of the proceeds from the sale of this shirt are going be used to support Ukraine. The plan is to allocate 50% to the Toronto Ukrainian Foundation, which has been helping displaced Ukrainians settle in Canada, and the balance to Ukraine directly (via cryptocurrencies).

    If this sounds good to you, click here.

  • A new 15-minute city is being developed near Salt Lake City

    In 2018, the Utah State Legislature passed a bill creating a new land authority to guide the future development of 600 acres of state-owned land in Draper, Utah (just south of Salt Lake City). It’s near an area called The Point of the Mountain and so that’s what’s this project is now being called — The Point. Here’s a map to help you get situated:

    In addition to this being a big and meaningful development opportunity with an estimated 7,400 new households being contemplated, the land authority also wants this to become an innovation hub and a model “15-minute city.”

    There has been a lot of talk about 15-minute cities over the course of this pandemic, but the idea is simply to have all/most of your daily needs within walking distance of where you live and to not have to always rely on a car. This is a difficult thing to achieve in many cities, but I think it’s one the greatest urban amenities out there.

    A big part of this is creating the right street network and planning for enough density, which is why this can be so challenging to do after the fact. Street grids, in particular, tend to be extremely sticky and mostly immutable. In this case, the plan is to create car free zones (or limited vehicle zones) across the various centers of the development.

    Developing walkable communities from scratch is a lot harder than slotting into existing urban fabrics, particularly when you have a contrasting context all around it. You have to get a bunch of different things right for it to be successful. But we continue to see lot more of these urban-focused masterplanning efforts and I think the trend will only continue.

    If you’re a developer who would like to participate in The Point, the RFP door is currently open.

  • Toronto, Paris, Park City — New city tee collection from Globizen

    This week Globizen announced a collection of new city tees.

    Each t-shirt comes with a custom hand-drawn logo and playful colors that are intended to reflect the spirit of each place. The first three cities are Toronto, Paris, and Park City (Utah). And the goal is that once this first release is sold out, there will be a subsequent drop with three new places.

    This is a project we’ve been thinking about for a while now, so it feels great to get it out the door. To pre-order a city collection tee, click here. All prices in Canadian. Global shipping available. Please note that these are pre-orders. All tees will ship in early 2022.

    If you have any feedback on the tees, I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.