The Town of Vail and Vail Resorts on Tuesday announced a partnership to develop a fourth base village at the Vail ski area where the ski area operator a decade ago planned to build its own luxury village with condos and hotel rooms. This time around, Avon-based East West Partners will develop the new base village on the roughly 12-acre parcel on Gore Creek.
The partnership deal includes workforce housing and the ski area company agreeing to drop its appeal of the town’s April 2022 condemnation and eminent domain acquisition of the 23-acre property in East Vail where Vail Resorts planned housing for 165 employees. The town rejected the East Vail project citing impact to bighorn sheep that winter on the parcel.
They are calling it the West Lionshead project. It’s just downstream from Lionshead Village and upstream of the Grand Hyatt hotel at Cascade Village. The plan will go through a long public process with many meetings as the town, developer and resort operator work out the details of the new base village.
“Vail has always been a community and mountain that embraces innovation, and this new fourth base village marks the next chapter in innovative partnerships that will ensure Vail stays the leading resort community in North America, and one of the best mountain towns anywhere,” reads a statement from Chris Frampton, the chief executive of East West Partners, which has built dozens of projects in Vail, Beaver Creek, Eagle, Denver, Snowmass Village, Steamboat Springs, California, South Carolina, Hawaii and Utah.
The Vail Town Council on Tuesday unanimously approved the new partnership and the master planning process with a promise to prioritize the West Lionshead village project.
It’s not the first time the Vail council has approved a major project on the resort company’s West Lionshead property. In 2012, the council wrapped five years of planning that included more than 80 public meetings to approve Vail Resorts’ plan for what was then called Ever Vail. The property is home to a maintenance yard, very tired office and commercial spaces, a former gas station and an employee parking lot on the Frontage Road. The Ever Vail plan envisioned a mix of 422 condos, hotel rooms and housing units, a commercial village, a recreation center, spa, office space and more than 400 parking spaces.
Vail Resorts first began planning for Ever Vail in 2005 and the 2009 and 2010 approvals for the project expired at the end of 2020 without any work on the parcel.
Vail Resorts was a different company back then. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, resort operators were focused on village building and selling slopeside condos. The Great Recession decimated those companies — like American Skiing Co., the former owner of Steamboat ski area, and Intrawest, the former owner of Copper Mountain and operator of Winter Park ski area. Vail Resorts in 2008 launched the Epic Pass and began a transformative transition away from real estate development. The idea was to avoid the debt and volatility of real estate and deploy third-party builders — like East West Partners — to handle the risks of development.