Photo: Intrawest
(Originally published in TOURISM)
If one of the golden rules of resort development is the need to create places where guests will experience a certain "pedestrian‑friendliness", few resort developers have been as transparent as Intrawest about the guiding principles they use to achieve this goal. The Vancouver‑based resort company has properties in North America and around the world, but is better known in Canada for its activities at Whistler Blackcomb (BC) and Mont‑Tremblant (Quebec) – two places with very different histories but where the same principles apply, according to executive vice president David Greenfield.
“In 1986, Intrawest had the opportunity to purchase Blackcomb Mountain, one of the two mountains at Whistler. At the time, Intrawest was a real estate developer focused mainly on Vancouver, Western Canada, and North‑western United States," Greenfield continues. "We saw an opportunity to combine the operational management expertise at Blackcomb Mountain with Intrawest’s real estate experience. In the world of winter resorts at the time, you didn’t often see the marriage of the two.”
Intrawest embarked on a master planning exercise at Blackcomb. “We thought the best way to approach this was to bring together some of the better minds in the resort planning world, and Intrawest did just that."
Meanwhile, another opportunity presented itself at the other end of the country, for which this insight of another contributor was required: Eldon Beck. He had been involved with the original master planning of Whistler village and Vail, Colorado. “We realized that he was the only one who had the special eye and skills that were needed to create a ‘true’ resort village,” notes Greenfield. “With his help, we began to grasp what it takes. Eldon Beck understands the true underpinnings of why villages in mountain places really work – and what are the main physical, spiritual and social foundations for those resorts.”
Nowhere would these foundations be more rigorously put to the test than at Mont‑Tremblant: “This was our first real entry into building a village from the ground up, in 1991. Tremblant was absolutely on its last legs and it would probably have withered away if nobody had picked it up when we did. What we found was such an incredible wealth of culture and a rare authenticity. You don’t have to fabricate it; it is just there – in the local history, the history of the province and in the place itself. It wasn’t hard to create a village with so many elements around you to draw from.”
Tremblant was one of the first resort villages in North America, established in 1938, Greenfield explains: “The only other true ski resort in North America to that date was Sun Valley, Idaho. Tremblant was second and, in fact, bought a lift from Sun Valley to create the first ski lift at Tremblant. The architecture at the time was somewhat unique because the original owner/developer – a fellow by the name of Joe Ryan – had a created his own traditions around his view of what should go on in a resort in that particular setting.”
Mont Tremblant had been part of the Quebec psyche for generations, so when Intrawest took it over, the company realized it needed to capitalize on that heritage. “We started talking to people and all these incredible memories about growing up as kids and enjoying this wonderful international destination in the 50s and 60s emerged. We started to piece together all these stories, local styles and cultural elements, and got a sense not so much of what Tremblant should look like, but of what it should feel like.”
Drawing on the knowledge of people who had lived in the area for years (long‑time ski instructors and staff members who had been at the resort for 30 years), Greenfield could envision how to re‑kindle the dream that was so alive in the 1930s and 1940s.
He and his team made trips to Europe to look at resort villages in the mountains, in order to gain insight into how the villages there are physically configured. “We also visited locations throughout Québec to see if there were architectural stylings which we felt were important, and we came up with a plan for the village inspired by some of the original architecture. You can’t just go in there and put up the kind of Western Canadian architecture that we would put up in Whistler and Blackcomb.”
The result had to convey a certain authenticity in the dominant sense of place: “We wanted a hotel that was reminiscent of an old Chateau that you might have seen in Québec City or in other places," emphasizes Greenfield. "We wanted a small commercial area with the old buildings to be very much a statement about what Tremblant was back in the 1930s. Everything that you see there says ‘Quebec’. We also felt it was important to preserve certain buildings as a statement about what Tremblant was and should be in the future."
He gives the example of a church built in the late 1930s that is really an icon for the resort. “There was a collection of smaller buildings which we had to relocate to a place where we could create a kind of historic pedestrian village, and use it in an entertainment capacity with food and beverage areas because there was a heritage theme we felt we should preserve there.”
"Placemaking", as Intrawest sees it, is a philosophy that the organization tries to apply. “We are human; sometimes we are very successful at it and we sometimes miss the mark in our interpretations. People go to Europe and they say: ‘you know these villages are fantastic’. It is easy to forget they have developed over hundreds of years; we are trying to build places in 4 or 5 years!”
Greenfield is of the opinion that we must give today’s villages the time to grow and organically evolve. “The tendency sometimes is to judge results a little too early.” As he boils down some of the principles that make great resort villages, Greenfield makes the following recommendations:
“The village has to be true to its history and culture. It must fit into the natural landscape, so it doesn’t look like it has been forced in there. It has to have a great sense of scale in relation to the surroundings, but also scaled to the size people would expect the architecture for that area to be. There needs to be variety, intrigue and excitement in the environment. Eldon Beck always talks about the voyage of discovery in the village – people should not be able to start at one end and stand there and look and decipher everything at once. You need to be drawn into places and discover your way through the village as you walk – there should be that constant sense of discovery.”
A number of elements contribute to that. In facilities like the Four Seasons Whistler, Greenfield mentions the use of natural building materials in a design which has almost a contemporary feel to it. “It is almost a West Coast derivative. There is a strong sense of the natural environment but we use it in a contemporary way. At Whistler, we don’t have a history harking back to 200 or 300 years ago from which to draw; the flavour therefore is more akin to a national park lodge.”
At Mont Tremblant’s main plaza, there used to be 100 or so Adirondack chairs that, on any given day, people would make use of, moving them around to face the sun. This was a simple tradition that the new owners kept, because of the way guests used the chairs to make themselves at home, expressing even a tiny bit of their own personality. The Adirondack chairs create the animation, and the environment lends itself to personal interpretations.
It has been said that placemaking is the “art of finding yourself in a place where you live.” That is what great resorts make possible.
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