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“Basically our objective is to resurrect Wildhorse”
The Mt. Crested Butte Town Council got a preview of what they can expect to see in the Wildhorse at Prospect subdivision, where five open foundations have caused safety and aesthetic concerns for more than two years.
The subdivision on Mt. Crested Butte’s north side sits on prime real estate, overlooking the East River Valley and located near the Goldlink chairlift. But after seeing 24 single-family homes and three duplexes developed in Wildhorse, and foundations built for five more, the real estate market crashed, taking with it the town’s hope of having homes built to cover the new foundations.
Then last fall, after the Town Council had declared the unfinished foundations to be a nuisance and the property slid into receivership with a bank, a group of individuals with various expertise came together, as Wildhorse Homes, LLC, to buy the five foundations with an option to buy another 19 vacant lots.
“Basically our objective is to resurrect Wildhorse, improve upon it and bring some life back into that community,” Crockett Farnell, the Wildhorse Homes’ construction partner, told the council at a meeting Tuesday, February 18. “We’ll try to upgrade it fairly substantially from its current condition, first and foremost by constructing some units on these dead foundations.”
It was just what the council wanted to hear after having to deal, sporadically, with issues related to Wildhorse. Farnell said if things go according to plan, he and his team—including Jeff Hermanson and Grant Bennett—hope to have permits to build two prototype homes on existing foundations by April and start construction “as soon as we can get the snow off the slabs out there.”
“Our concept is to build a better version of what was there and upgrade the neighborhood,” Farnell said.
The Wildhorse Homes development team has been working with the Wildhorse Home Owners Association to come up with ways to make some upgrades in the new models without working against the look that already exists in the subdivision.
Farnell told the council the new homes would have bigger porches and decks to accommodate people in the summer months and larger living areas and kitchens to give them a more open feel. One model will offer an improved room above the garage with a bathroom, a wet bar and 500 square feet of space.
“The summer is becoming more and more popular up here and we see these units as being nice ski houses, but they’re going to be really nice summer homes when people bring their entire families,” Farnell said.
There’s also a push to upgrade the color palette available to people building houses in Wildhorse and get away from a palette Farnell called, “pretty monochromatic.”
“[The HOA is] open to and enthusiastic about us providing a new color palette that will allow each individual homeowner to select a color within a specified range so the subdivision can have a little more variation and look a little more organic than it currently looks and feels,” Farnell said.
For Gary Hartman, the architect for the project now and when it was first developed, it’s a chance to see the construction through to something closer to what he had originally envisioned.
“I know Gary, who was the original architect for this project, is looking forward to getting it built. A lot of the things he had envisioned initially had kind of gone by the wayside in the original Hazleton and Eagle property version of this,” Farnell said, referring to the property’s previous developers. “So we’re hoping to make it more of what he had envisioned for a little higher end of the market.”
Farnell said he expects his team to learn a lot about what the market wants after building the first two single family homes, which will be built in slightly different configurations. But he’s not so sure about what to do with the foundation for the duplex, which came as part of the deal with the bank.
“They wanted those foundations off their hands. It’s not economically feasible with current market conditions. [Duplexes] cost almost as much to build as the single-family homes and they’re only generating about 60 percent of the revenue at this point,” Farnell said. “We’re trying to come up with a number of different ideas for that.”
The foundation might be converted to support a single-family home, it could serve as a foundation for a clubhouse, or it could get plowed under and be converted to green space.
Landscaping will be one starting point for Wildhorse’s new owners, with improvements to common areas that have been neglected and gone by the wayside. Those things and some actual construction will start at the subdivision this spring.
