The Lodge at Blue Sky - An Auberge Resort

The Lodge at Blue Sky - An Auberge Resort

You leave the interstate at Wanship, a Summit County hamlet that barely registers as a town, and follow the Old Lincoln Highway into a valley of sage, scrub oak and aspen. Salt Lake City airport is about 45 minutes behind you, and Park City around half an hour’s drive away. The ranch was a private retreat before it was a hotel: Mike and Barb Phillips used the 3,500 acres for years as a weekend place before partnering with Auberge to build the lodge, Mike being the founder of Phillips Edison & Company, the shopping-centre investment firm, and Barb the force behind the Saving Gracie Equine Healing Foundation, the non-profit horse rescue she founded, which is the emotional centre of the whole operation. Auberge opened it in May 2019 as its first Utah property, with buildings by AJC Architects, who also designed the High West distillery on the ranch. There are 46 rooms and suites across three buildings: the Sky Lodge, the main block of glass and local limestone, the Earth House, which seems to grow out of a hillside and holds 22 Earth Suites, and five freestanding Creek Houses in a secluded aspen grove along Alexander Creek. The Phillips family owns it, Auberge runs it, and you can feel both hands on the place, the owners’ in the animals and the land, the operator’s in the polish. Interiors are by Design 360 Unlimited, working in wood, stone, glass, leather, polished concrete, marble and slate, and the arrival is the most theatrical moment of the stay, through steel doors into a foyer wrapped in black steel that recalls a mineshaft, a reference to Utah’s mining history. Earth Suites run to 735 square feet, each with a private terrace, outdoor fireplace, canyon view and outdoor shower, and share living roofs of native grasses and wildflowers with the spa. The adults-only Creek Houses come with indoor fireplaces, 14-foot ceilings, glass doors that open fully in summer, and custom fly rods and tackle for fishing from the private bank. The Sky Lodge holds the bar, a wine room, a 70-foot infinity pool, and Yuta, where the kitchen is run by Guillermo Tellez, a Mexico-born chef and the first recipient of the James Beard Foundation’s Felipe Rojas-Lombardi Award for Hispanic chefs, cooking from Gracie’s Farm, worked by an all-female team the hotel calls FarmHers. The wine list won a Wine Spectator award in 2025. In summer there is WildKitchen, Guy Ritchie’s open-fire dining concept, brought to the US for the first time here in 2024 after a visit to his Ashcombe estate in England. The Edge Spa covers 7,400 square feet on a precipice above Alexander Creek, with five treatment rooms looking out through 12-foot windows. High West’s distillery is on the ranch too, though it and the lodge are run independently. What it feels like is a working ranch with a five-star operating system installed on top, and the ranch part is not decoration. The owners now keep more than 50 rescue animals, and the horses are trained with natural horsemanship methods, with guests invited to groom, feed and ride them in the arena and on the trails. Days fill quickly with fly fishing, sporting clays in a covered, heated five-stand pavilion, and in winter helicopter access through Powderbird to 200,000 acres of high-alpine terrain. The architecture is crisp contemporary Western, no log-cabin pastiche, though the Sky Lodge has the clean, expensive smoothness of a well-funded resort, and you notice the Auberge template more there than out in the Creek Houses, which are the best rooms on the property. It suits couples who want to be outdoors all day and properly looked after at night, and families with children young enough for the Little Vaqueros programme, which takes ages four to twelve. You should not come if you want to ski in and out, walk to dinner, or feel you have a place to yourselves; the ranch also has a long history as a wedding and corporate venue, and a private residential expansion was unveiled in March 2026, so expect shared terraces and some sense of a growing estate. The slopes in Park City and Deer Valley are a drive, not a stroll, and the bill is that of a serious Western resort. You should come for the Creek Houses at night with the water running past, for mornings with Barb Phillips’ horses, and for a ranch where the founders’ attachment to the land still shapes what you do with your day. The short version: A 46-room Auberge ranch resort on 3,500 acres outside Park City, owned by Mike and Barb Phillips, with an on-site horse rescue, a farm supplying the kitchen, and High West’s distillery down the road.