Caldera House Jackson Hole

Caldera House Jackson Hole

Next door to the red cabins of Jackson Hole’s Aerial Tram, at 3275 West Village Drive in Teton Village, a thirty-minute drive from Jackson Hole Airport, Caldera House is the first thing you reach on the walk from the car park to the mountain, a low timber and glass building at the foot of Rendezvous Mountain that opened in the summer of 2018 as an eight-suite hotel and the base of a members-only alpine club. It was built by four friends, Wesley Edens, Michael Novogratz, Randal Nardone and the Pulitzer-winning writer David Barry, as their own way into the mountain, and the money shows (the building reportedly cost $100 million) without being spent on spectacle. The Jackson firm Carney Logan Burke designed the building, while Roman Alonso’s Los Angeles studio Commune took the public rooms, the restaurant, the café and two of the suites. There are four two-bedroom suites of 1,500 square feet and four four-bedroom suites of 5,000 square feet, which is to say there is no such thing as a room here, only apartments, and Michelin gave it two Keys. Edens, a Fortress Investment Group co-founder and longtime Jackson Hole regular, remains the presence behind it, and the on-site ski shop is run by the local skier Gov Carrington. The suites are named for the world’s calderas, Valles on the top floor with high ceilings and a long view of Rendezvous Mountain from the living room, Taupo in darker tones with furniture gathered from designers around the world, and the references throughout are the golden era of ski hotels and mid-century American craft, with American artworks, European furniture and custom oak millwork set against Scandinavian mid-century pieces and work by local makers. One master bathroom has a freestanding Boffi tub, another a soaking tub cut from slabs of black stone, and every suite has a chef’s kitchen, a wood-burning fireplace, a mudroom, a laundry and a balcony with a fire pit, gas grill and snowmelt patio. Downstairs is Old Yellowstone Garage, the Italian restaurant David and Cinzia Gilbert ran in Jackson until 2007, revived here with Paulie O’Connor, who cooked for them from 2001, back in the kitchen, its copper-clad bar and burnt orange crescent booths giving it the feel of a 1950s French mountain restaurant. Southcable Café faces the slope for quick food, and a third-floor lounge has a wood-burning fireplace and heated patio, while the spa runs to an infinity hot plunge, a dry sauna and a fitness studio, with treatments also done in-suite. What you are really booking is a house in Teton Village with a staff, a restaurant and a ski shop on the ground floor, and the experience is closer to a family chalet in Verbier than to any American resort hotel. Mornings start in your own kitchen, boots go on in your own mudroom, the tram is a short walk across the snow, and evenings end at your own fire or at the copper bar with club members who ski the same couloirs. It suits groups who want to be under one roof without being in each other’s way, several generations of a family, or friends who split a four-bedroom suite and cook for one another, and in summer it works as a base for Grand Teton National Park, a few minutes’ drive away. You should not come if you are two people looking for a small, room-service hotel with a lobby to watch, because the smallest thing here has two bedrooms and a dining table for six, and you should not come if you want the bars of Jackson’s town square on foot, since the town is twelve miles down the valley. You should not come for a pool scene either, that is the Four Seasons across the village. You should come if you ski seriously, travel as a group, like to eat at home as often as out, and want a building where the design was thought through by people who planned to stay in it themselves. The short version: An eight-suite hotel and private alpine club beside the Jackson Hole Aerial Tram, opened in 2018 by Wesley Edens and three friends, with two- and four-bedroom apartments by Carney Logan Burke and Commune, and Old Yellowstone Garage downstairs.