The Little Nell

The Little Nell

At 675 East Durant Avenue, at the foot of Aspen Mountain and seventeen steps from the Silver Queen Gondola, is the only hotel in town you can ski straight back to, a four-storey building that opened on Thanksgiving Day 1989 on a plot that had already been a Ute summer hunting ground, a miners’ retreat, a railroad depot, a pasture for the Aspen Dairy and, from 1947, a ski-bum bar called The Little Nell, named in turn for a silver mining claim on the slope above. There are 92 rooms and suites, at 7,908 feet, three miles from Aspen/Pitkin County Airport and about four hours’ drive west of Denver. The hotel belongs to Aspen Skiing Company, which belongs to the Crown family of Chicago, so the people who run the mountain also run the building at the bottom of it, and it has carried both Forbes Five-Star and AAA Five-Diamond ratings for decades, alongside membership of Relais & Châteaux. The Chicago designer Holly Hunt reworked the guest rooms and suites for the hotel’s twentieth anniversary, and New York’s Champalimaud Design later lightened the 52 standard rooms, 26 premium rooms and eight junior suites into blues, tans and greys, a nod to the mining town without any saloon pastiche. The largest suites are named for the people who made modern Aspen, among them Walter Paepcke, whose suite runs to 2,500 square feet, and Friedl Pfeifer, the Austrian racer who founded the Aspen Ski School. Culinary director Matt Zubrod has run the kitchens since 2015, and the flagship, Element 47, named for silver’s atomic number, opened in 2012 in a room by Bentel & Bentel, cooking Colorado produce and local wagyu. The wine is the real story, a cellar of more than 20,000 bottles, a Wine Spectator Grand Award, a list that has passed through the hands of Bobby Stuckey, Richard Betts and Carlton McCoy, and ten staff who earned the Master Sommelier diploma here, more by the hotel’s count than at any other establishment. Ajax Tavern handles lunch on the gondola plaza, Chair 9 handles après, and there is a spa and a heated outdoor pool. From the street it is a low, unremarkable block, and the rooms, comfortable as they are, will not be what you remember. What you remember is friction disappearing: boots warmed overnight, skis waiting at the lift, a sommelier who knows which Austrian bottle is underpriced, a staff that has seen every kind of Aspen guest since 1989 and treats none of them as a novelty. It is a hotel of service and logistics, run by a ski company that understands both, and the effect is less glamorous than the town around it and more useful. You should not come if you want architecture to talk to you, a lobby scene to watch, or anything resembling value, since a winter week here is priced exactly as its position allows, and you should not come for the off-season, when the hotel closes altogether. You should come if you ski properly and want the shortest possible distance between bed and gondola, if wine is a reason you travel, and if you would take a staff who remembers how you like your coffee over a room that photographs well. The short version: A 92-room ski-in, ski-out hotel at the base of Aspen Mountain, opened in 1989 and owned by Aspen Skiing Company, with one of America’s most decorated hotel wine cellars at Element 47.