This article originally appeared in the June 1992 issue of Architectural Digest.
“Is he up there?” asks the clerk at the K-mart in Orem, Utah, of a customer in a ski suit who has stopped to buy some film, lip gloss and an ice pack. The question neither gets nor needs elaboration. “He” is Robert Redford, and “up there” means at Sundance, only ten miles past the mall, the discount gas station, the night driving range, the VFW post, the trailer camp with “ultra-modern conveniences,” but in a state—a pure America—of its own.
There is certainly no flag that flies over the general store when Redford is “up there,” and yet Sundance is so much the stronghold of his taste, activism and charisma that even when he's not home, one feels his vigilant presence. The staff is mostly young, with shining faces out of a Gap ad (if you're middle-aged they may remind you more of Getting Clean for Gene), and they work with an esprit de corps and a commitment to service that only loyalty to an individual, rather than to a paycheck, could inspire. One imagines that the monks on Mount Athos receive their visitors with the same mixture of pride and deference.
Redford discovered Sundance as a college student. He camped there in summer and tested his prowess on the slopes when they still belonged to a little ski station with one lift and a Samoan-style restaurant. After his marriage and his first modest successes as an actor, he built a house on a two-acre plot with his own hands. As his power and fortune grew, he used them to fight development in the canyon, or at least to define growth in his own terms. The landscape moved him for reasons he can't or won't articulate but that, in fact, are not obscure to anyone with a romantic sense of place. Students of humility—and Redford, in his own strange way, is one—have always loved mountains. They reward devotion the way works of art do, by becoming more elusive the closer you get to them.
The actor, of course, has specialized in romantic heroes: mountain men, downhill racers and cowboys, including the eponymous Sundance Kid. But he has also played Jay Gatsby—a character closer to his heart than one might imagine. There is, ironically, more than a little Gatsby to the resort: not the flash, for there is none, and not the arrivisme, because that is not the Redford nor the Sundance style. No, Sundance is Gatsby-like because Redford's sense of grandeur is so American; and because the hospitality one receives feels less like that of a resort than of a private estate whose owner doesn't always happen to know who his guests are.
Gatsby was obsessed with a beautiful and fickle woman. Redford's Daisy has always been the wilderness. He never wanted to run a ski resort, but the incomparable Wasatch powder helps to pay for his true passions: preserving the landscape; coaxing the wildlife back to its native habitat; sponsoring experimentation and a sense of community in the arts; and providing a forum for dialogue on the environment. The Sundance Institute, founded in 1980, initially focused on cinema, nurturing the kind of risk taking, a “freedom to fail,” as Redford puts it, that doesn't usually find commercial backers. It has since expanded to include laboratories in such disciplines as playwriting and film composition. Many of the institute's fellows and mentors return to spend off-season time at Sundance, and some—like Sydney Pollack and David Puttnam—have bought second homes there.
Recreational facilities—ski lifts, hiking and riding trails—occupy only about a tenth of the five thousand acres at Sundance, and the buildings themselves about a tenth of that. If Redford could have made them invisible, he probably would have. The original guest cottages were designed by John Shirley and conceived of by him and Redford as a kind of pueblo, a housing cluster that would command a view but not spoil one. They are built of local materials—roughhewn pine and stone—that to some degree camouflage their existence. The design makes allusions to the log cabin, the Maine camp, the sportsman's lodge—to American ideals of rustic shelter in the wilderness. But let us note that the term cottage is, in fact, one of those traditional Yankee understatements popular in Newport and Bar Harbor. The larger cottages are actually duplex chalets with a cathedral ceiling, a sheltered porch, a whirlpool tub and a fireplace stocked with fresh wood every day. If one overdoes it on the slopes, it does not feel excessively confining to spend an afternoon with one's bad knee propped on a tapestry pillow, reading a novel by Louis L'Amour and making gourmet popcorn in the microwave.
Long before there was a Sundance catalogue that embodied Redford's environmentalism in a line of merchandise, designers Mary Whitesides and Nancy Maynard had defined a Sundance aesthetic for the cottage interiors. They too are meticulously “unspoiled.” Everything is natural, nothing is precious, although a sense of fragility comes from the bouquets of dried wildflowers, the antique quilts and wicker and the Indian artifacts. Roman shades in bleached cotton filter the light. Weathered pine and painted tables are handmade for Sundance by craftspeople in Santa Fe. A retired local blacksmith produces the rawhide-and-iron lamps from a design by Whitesides. The pebble-colored carpets serve as foils for handloomed kilims. Sofas and chairs are overstuffed, and their scoured tones contrast with the rich blanket colors—crimson, basalt and verdigris—of accent pieces. The cottages are, in fact, a showcase for western artisanship and tribal folklore. But then, so is the film business.
The Indians and the moose always disappeared from the Provo canyon with the first snows and returned after the thaw, and a large number of visitors are seeing their wisdom. By May the mud has dried and the yellow organ grape starts to bloom. The filmmakers' laboratory is held in June, as the aspens are turning a luminous green. The summer theater opens its season under the stars; and the alpine wildflowers reach their tumultuous peak of color in mid-July, just after the Bluegrass Festival. This summer, sixteen new cottages will be ready for their first visitors. They have been decorated in either a “cowboy” style, with blanket sofas and log beds, or an 'Amish" style, with painted folk art furniture. Set in a grove of old conifers, with “friendly” front porches and winding paths, the cottages, says Whitesides, have the feeling of a small campus. Also in the works is the Pines, an eighteen-suite inn.
Come to Sundance for the collegiate fellowship, brunch, the exercise, music, theater, dessert, fresh Utah trout, to take creative risks and fail, even because you love log beds. But don't bother unless you also truly love nature. “There are plenty of resorts where you can find a version of the scene you left behind in New York or Los Angeles, but not here,” says Whitesides. 'And we're trying like crazy to keep it that way."
