Not Like a Hotel
On restoration, restraint, and what Alpine House already knew how to be.
Most hotels are renovated the same way. You clear out what's there, bring in new furniture, new finishes, new art selected from a catalog. The result looks expensive and feels like nowhere in particular. Architect Elizabeth Roberts and her team walked through a lot of Jackson Hole's hotels before touching a single room at the Alpine House. What they found was that nearly everything looked the same. This wasn't because the designers lacked talent, but because the brief was always the same: meet the five-star standard, hit the checklist, deliver what luxury is supposed to look like. Warmth wasn't on the checklist.
We didn't want that. When we decided to renovate Alpine House, we called Elizabeth because her practice is built on the specific belief that every building contains its own best answer, if you're willing to look for it. After her architecture degree, Elizabeth went back for a master's in historic preservation at Columbia, drawn to the idea that old and new, set alongside each other, make both look better. That focus became a specialty: restoring 19th-century townhouses in New York City, buildings with a century or more of lives embedded in them, where the work is more about what's already there than what you bring in. Alpine House was one of her first hotel projects. And that’s exactly why we called her.
Bringing a NewYork City-based architect to Jackson could have gone wrong easily. The local vernacular is specific, and the line between referencing it and caricaturing it is thin. Before making any decisions, Elizabeth and her team were up at five in the morning visiting six to eight properties before lunch, studying what was genuine to this place and what had been copied so many times it had lost any meaning. Grays, plaids, antlers, dark wood. Rinse and repeat. They knew early on what Alpine House was not going to be.
Erik Warner, the independent hotelier behind Arbus, was clear about what he wanted: let the building speak. His design brief was to feel like someone's second home, warm and interconnected, the kind of place where guests feel welcomed and disarmed enough to talk to each other and to the artists who would be in residence throughout the year. Not a hotel that performs luxury. A place people would wish they could live in.
Alpine House made that harder and more interesting at the same time. The building had been added to over the decades with different ideas about what it should be. Most architects would have treated that as a problem to solve by starting over. Elizabeth saw it differently. Her job was to find the order underneath the noise, unify what was worth keeping, and create something unexpected from what was already there. One early decision set the tone: painting the entire exterior a single monotone color, which turned a building that read as many disconnected pieces into something that finally felt like one thing. It was a labor of love, as she describes it, and one that surprised even her team when it came together.
The furniture followed the same philosophy. Elizabeth brought in Robin Rathmann-Noonan, her interior design director, whose instinct from the start was that ordering everything new would have made both the old and the new look out of place. The only way to make it all feel right was to find pieces that already had some age to them. What followed was like no sourcing process either of them had done before. They built relationships with vintage sellers around the country, sending images of what they were looking for and waiting to see what came back from inventory. They found mid-century furniture held by sellers in Seattle, bid on pieces through live auction houses, sourced a mid-century American office chair from a Connecticut auction, reused or existing pieces, and tracked down a Texas upholstery workroom to reupholster vintage goods in new contract fabrics. Danish Farstrup leather lounge chairs from the 1960s. A Scandinavian teak desk. A mid-century American office chair from an auction house in Connecticut. Two domestic custom manufacturers. No factory in Guangdong. Every piece chosen because it felt like it had always been there.
The art collection worked the same way. In the Bar and Library, historic etchings by Hans Kleiber, a former U.S. Forest Ranger who turned to printmaking in the 1920s, and Kerr Eby, an early 20th century illustrator known primarily as a war artist, show the American West the way it looked to people who actually lived and worked in it. In every guestroom, a unique hand-carved relief print by David Miles Lusk, a Missoula-based artist whose work Robin discovered through a Montana artist residency program and commissioned for the property. His imagery she also had painted directly onto the large Noguchi light fixture at the center of the Lounge.
The footprint from this philosophy (calculated by the Center for Responsible Hospitality and Mindclick) followed: 922 kg of CO2e avoided, 331 lbs of waste diverted from landfill, 502 kg of shipping emissions saved by sourcing vintage domestically instead of manufacturing overseas. Not because anyone was requiring those outcomes, but because respecting the building and choosing what already exists over what could be ordered new turns out to be better in almost every way.
"See the good and make it better," is how Elizabeth describes her practice. At Alpine House, the good was already there. It just needed someone willing to find it.