Stein Eriksen Lodge

Stein Eriksen Lodge

Stein Eriksen won giant slalom gold for Norway at the 1952 Oslo Olympics, spent the following decades running ski schools across America, and in December 1982, a year after Edgar Stern opened Deer Valley Resort in Utah’s Wasatch Range, opened the lodge the two men had planned after touring the European ski hotels Eriksen had known since childhood. It is set mid-mountain at Silver Lake, about three miles above downtown Park City and roughly forty minutes’ drive from Salt Lake City International, on ten acres of aspen with the runs directly below. It has 180 rooms, 68 of them suites, the largest sleeping fourteen, and because each one is an individually owned condominium run as part of the hotel, no two are laid out quite alike. Eriksen died in December 2015 at 88, the lodge still marks Stein Day every December, and the whole operation is run by Russ Olsen, president and CEO of the Stein Collection, which also looks after The Chateaux Deer Valley and the Stein Eriksen Residences nearby. The interiors were settled long before anyone thought to call a hotel Scandinavian: heavy timber furniture, big stone fireplaces, a palette of slate, cream and dark wood, and a 2015 refresh by the Park City studio Juxtapose that tidied the look without replacing it. Every room has a jetted tub and its own exterior entrance, so you can walk out to the snow without crossing the lobby, and the suites add full kitchens, gas fireplaces and, in many cases, a hot tub on the deck. The Glitretind, named for Norway’s second-highest peak, serves dinner and a Sunday brunch the lodge says was the first of its kind in Utah, from a kitchen Zane Holmquist led for more than two decades before announcing his retirement at the end of 2026; Jonathon Miller, executive chef since 2016, now oversees culinary operations across the group. Troll Hallen, the lounge, covers breakfast, lunch, après and late dinners by the fire. The spa, expanded in 2009 under director Jill VanAusdal, runs to 23,000 square feet with sixteen treatment rooms, two of them for couples, and a pool deck with an outdoor fireplace. This is a hotel that has done the same thing for more than forty years, and its regulars would object to anything else: families who book the same suite for the same February week, grandparents who remember Eriksen on the hill, staff like Miller and food and beverage head Jason Berrett who joined in the early 2000s and never left. Service follows Deer Valley’s founding habit of anticipating what guests need before they ask, ski valets, lockers a few steps from the snow, a short lift that brings you back up to them at lunch. It is formal in the way old alpine hotels are formal, unhurried and attentive without stiffness, and some of the public rooms, the lobby and parts of the Glitretind in particular, read as dated to guests who want their luxury to look recent. You should not come if you want a scene, a design narrative, or a hotel that photographs as though it opened last season, as the Montage and the St. Regis further along the mountain cater to that guest, and you should not come with snowboarders, because Deer Valley still allows skiers only. You should come if you want the best ski-in, ski-out position on the mountain, a suite large enough for three generations under one roof, and a staff that will remember your name and your coffee order the following winter. The short version: Norwegian Olympic champion Stein Eriksen’s 1982 ski lodge, mid-mountain at Deer Valley, Utah, with 180 individually owned rooms and suites, a 23,000-square-foot spa and the Glitretind restaurant, run by the Stein Collection since its opening decades.