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Developer Mark Hunt’s proposal to tear down and reconstruct the west-facing wall of the old Crystal Palace building, which is being redeveloped into a high-end boutique hotel, won approval from the Aspen Historic Preservation Commission in a 4-3 vote at a special meeting held Tuesday.
HPC closed out the meeting, which exceeded three and a half hours, by voting on a motion that would allow what’s called a “substantial amendment” to the HPC’s original approvals granted the project in 2017. Construction began in 2019.
Members voting in favor — Peter Fornell, Kim Raymond, Dakota Severe and Riley Warwick — agreed that the downtown project has reached the point where it needs to be finished sooner than later. From the parking spaces the project has taken up to the unfinished construction work on a high-profile block downtown, the project has dragged on enough, they said.
The development team has said the building’s west wall — which faces Monarch Street — has held up the project because it is structurally unsound. They asked to demolish the wall and rebuild it with remaining historic bricks and materials while moving the mural to the center of the new wall.
Preserving the wall, which is now the last remaining portion of the 300 E. Hyman Avenue building with historic significance, which also is in doubt, was part of the original approval.
After the project started, however, it was discovered the west wall actually was not historic and instead reflected a hodgepodge of changes over the years.
“This is not a normal project,” Hunt told the HPC. “There were things that were unfolding that we realized were not historic.”
The HPC’s decision went against the recommendation of the city’s community development department, which argued for the HPC to not vote on the matter and provide Hunt with a directive on an alternative course to take to remedy the problem.
“I think staff is struggling thinking about these considerations because the community understood that to be an important part of the project,” Ben Anderson, director of community development, told the HPC. Anderson said he did not disagree with the development team’s findings about the wall, but he wanted a different treatment of the wall without deconstructing and reconstructing it.
HPC members who cast dissenting votes — Roger Moyer, Barb Pitchford and Kara Thompson — said they didn’t like the idea of what they felt was a rushed decision.
Pitchford and Moyer were particularly vocal about their disapproval of what they were asked to bless. The three dissenting members also said it’s not the HPC’s responsibility to get the developer out of a jam; that’s on the developer, they said.
“It’s an incredibly difficult process as it was in 2017,” said Moyer, who was on the HPC board then when it originally approved the project. “I was actually insulted, and the city was insulted by this (proposed substantial amendment).”
Moyer was in a minority, though. All people speaking during the meeting’s public comments portion of the meeting favored the proposal. Those people included at least two of Hunt’s tenants in other buildings that he owns and three former members of the HPC.
The next step is for the city to craft a resolution for the HPC, which is a formality at this point. The Aspen City Council could call up the HPC’s decision and remand it to the commission for further consideration.
Aspen City Council gave the building historic designation in 1981. It will retain that designation unless the building’s owner files an application to delist it.
Hunt is owner of Aspen- and Chicago-based M Development, which, with Corte Madera, California-based RH, are redeveloping the former Crystal Palace building into a boutique hotel and the former Bidwell Building at Galena Street and East Cooper Avenue into an RH Design Gallery with retail and dining.
The RH Guesthouse will have 20 guestrooms, an RH Bath House and Spa and a restaurant, cafe and rooftop terrace. The hotel rooms will average 449 square feet in size, and conditions of approval require a minimum occupancy of two guests per room.
The projects, announced in January 2021, are part of a larger RH-Hunt endeavor called the “Aspen Ecosystem” with residential and retail components. As of August, RH had made capital contributions of $146 million to the project, according to a regulatory filing by the company.