Montage Deer Valley

Montage Deer Valley

Opened in December 2010 as the third property from Montage Hotels & Resorts, the company Alan J. Fuerstman launched on the bluffs of Laguna Beach in 2003, Montage Deer Valley is a 13-storey stone and timber lodge at Empire Pass, the highest residential corner of Deer Valley Resort, about 40 minutes by road from Salt Lake City International and ten minutes above Park City’s Main Street. HKS Hill Glazier designed the exterior, drawing on European Arts and Crafts detailing and the great mountain lodges of the American West. There are 220 rooms and suites, each with a fireplace and heated limestone bathroom floors, and private residences on the upper floors. Trisha Wilson of Wilson Associates did the original interiors in natural stone, wood and regional art. In 2023 the rooms were reworked by BraytonHughes Design Studios of San Francisco and the restaurants and lounges by Denton House Design Studio of Salt Lake City, with leaf-patterned green carpets, pale upholstery and a good deal of beamed timber. It is handsome and well made, not the kind of considered restraint you might find in a small Alpine hotel, but the windows face the Wasatch and the mountains do most of the work. Kevin Hee, the executive chef, reshuffled the restaurants for the 2025 to 2026 season. Apex, until then a steakhouse, now cooks French-inflected American food from breakfast to dinner, with a plat du jour each night, steak frites, moules-frites, and foraged mushrooms, juniper and pine from the surrounding forest. Yama Sushi, added in the resort’s second year, has become the signature room. Daly’s Pub & Rec, named for John Daly of the Daly West silver mine, is a family pub with an arcade, a children’s buffet and the only bowling alley in Park City. Spa Montage, with 29 treatment rooms, an indoor mosaic pool and copper soaking tubs, is the largest hotel spa in Utah. The skiing is the real reason to be here: Empire Express and Ruby Express are a couple of hundred yards from the door, and the ski valet does the rest. Staying here feels like a large, smoothly run American resort, with valets at every turn, children everywhere at Christmas, and conference groups in the shoulder seasons using its 60,000 square feet of event space. Deer Valley remains closed to snowboarders. You should not come if you want a small hotel with a strong design voice, or if anyone in your party snowboards. You should come for door-to-run skiing on one of the best-groomed mountains in North America, a spa large enough to lose an afternoon in, and a family week where the children bowl after dinner. The short version: A 220-room ski-in, ski-out resort at Empire Pass, above 8,000 feet on Deer Valley’s upper slopes, with a 35,000-square-foot spa, a bowling alley in the pub, and the confident scale of a grand Western lodge run to Montage’s Laguna Beach standard.