Madeline Hotel & Residences, Auberge Resorts Collection

Madeline Hotel & Residences, Auberge Resorts Collection

You arrive in Mountain Village, the purpose-built ski town that climbs the slope above Telluride’s box canyon in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, ten minutes from Telluride Regional Airport and eighty from Montrose, and the Madeline is the big stone-and-timber building on the plaza, a thirty-second walk from the gondola that lifts skiers onto the mountain in one direction and drops them into the old mining town in the other. It opened on 12 February 2009 as Capella Telluride, the end of more than a decade of planning and over $200 million in costs, designed by Denver’s Ivins Design Group with stone and timber sourced in Colorado, and it was in foreclosure within two years, after which its Swedish owners gave it the name it still has. Auberge Resorts Collection took it on in late 2017 with Flynn Properties, and today there are 83 rooms and suites alongside 71 privately owned residences of one to four bedrooms, which explains the slightly dual personality of the place, part hotel, part condominium village. Bryan Woody, who ran it through its rebuild as general manager, now oversees it as Auberge’s regional vice president. Rose Ink Workshop, the Miami interiors studio, redid the public spaces in January 2021 and then the guest rooms, trading Capella’s corporate polish for something closer to a well-off friend’s ski house: black steel desks, leather hooks made by Crossbow Leather in town, oversized canvases by Hana Margetson-Rushmore. Suites have gas fireplaces, heated bathroom floors and kitchenettes with Wolf stovetops, and the residences add full kitchens, laundry and balconies. The kitchens are run by Nicky Miscia, born in Florence, who cooked at the two-Michelin-starred Torre del Saracino in Vico Equense and helped open Mimo at the Four Seasons in Nashville, and he oversees Black Iron Kitchen + Bar, an 85-seat room on Heritage Plaza with fire tables on the patio and a menu built on Western Slope farms, Timber Room, the adult-leaning après bar, and Kettle, the newer coffee counter. There is an outdoor ice rink, a heated pool and terrace called the Alpine Swim Club, a spa, and, since the winter of 2025, Crest Club, a members’ ski club also designed by Rose Ink, with private lockers, a ski valet and a whiskey-heavy bar called the Falcon Room, whose founding members included Gus Kenworthy, the Olympic freestyle skier who grew up in Telluride. It is the only Forbes Five-Star resort in Telluride and was named in Michelin’s first round of Keys in 2024, and it behaves accordingly: skis taken at the door, boots warmed, s’mores laid out by the pool at sunset, music in Timber Room once a week. Much of what the Madeline does well is removing friction from a ski day at 9,500 feet, and it does that better than anywhere else in town. The trade is Mountain Village itself, which is newer, tidier and quieter than Telluride proper, and which some people find a little like a stage set after the lifts close. The gondola, free and running into the night, makes the Victorian main street easy, but you are commuting to the town’s character, not living in it. You should not come if you want to step out of the lobby onto Colorado Avenue, if you are after a small hotel where the staff learn your name by the second morning, or if the sound of children on an ice rink over Christmas week would spoil your holiday. You should come if you ski properly and want to be on the lift within minutes of finishing breakfast, if you are travelling as a family or a group that would fit better in a four-bedroom residence than a row of rooms, or if you want the best-run hotel in Telluride and can accept that it lives in the newer village up the hill. The short version: A ski-in, ski-out hotel in Telluride’s Mountain Village, built as Capella in 2009 and run by Auberge since 2017, with 83 rooms, 71 residences, a members’ ski club and the gondola thirty seconds from the door.