In Ketchum, Idaho, a small mountain town ideally known for its ski slopes and its unusually dark night skies, a new resort opening this fall is solving an old problem in an unfamiliar way: instead of building out, it built up for its cars.
The Observatory, a Viceroy Resort, sits at the edge of downtown Ketchum along Trail Creek, close enough to Bald Mountain that guests can see the runs from the property. Its namesake feature is a rooftop observatory with a 17-inch telescope, staffed by a local astronomer, for guests and neighbors to look up at one of the country’s protected dark-sky destinations. Below ground level, though, the property solved a much more practical problem: where to put 86 cars on a site with little room to spare.
It’s the kind of trade-off that small mountain towns run into often. Ketchum has never had much flat, buildable land to spare, and what little exists tends to go toward the things visitors actually come for rather than rows of parked cars. For a property planning to offer both a full valet operation and a rooftop stargazing deck on the same compact parcel, something had to give, and the resort’s answer was to let the cars share space more efficiently rather than sacrifice square footage elsewhere.
“The Observatory is exactly the kind of property mechanical parking was made for,” said Christopher Tiessen, CEO of KLAUS Multiparking America. “The team wanted every square foot working toward the guest experience, and a conventional garage would have taken land the site couldn’t give up. Storing cars two-high keeps the valet operation compact and close to the door, so arrival stays quick and parking never competes with the rest of the resort for space.”
For guests, the practical result is a shorter wait at the front door. Valet attendants retrieve vehicles from a compact, nearby stack rather than circling several levels of a conventional ramp garage; a small detail, but one that shapes a visitor’s very first minutes on the property, before they’ve even checked in or looked up at the sky.
The observatory deck, by contrast, is meant to slow guests down. The 17-inch PlaneWave telescope and the astronomer who operates it are open to hotel guests and, on select evenings, the wider Ketchum community, a nod to the area’s status as one of the relatively few places in the country dark enough for serious stargazing without leaving town.
When it opens, The Observatory will offer 73 rooms and suites alongside 12 condominium residences, a full-service spa with a hydrotherapy circuit, on-site dining and roughly 5,500 square feet of banquet and conference space, a mountain property built, from the ground to the rooftop telescope around the idea that in a small town with little land to spare, everything above and below the guest experience has to earn its footprint.
The two features sitting on opposite ends of the same building, a rooftop deck built for looking up, and a parking structure built for stacking vehicles close to the ground, are, in their own ways, both responses to the same limitation. Ketchum’s appeal has always rested on things that can’t be manufactured elsewhere: unlit skies, mountain terrain, a small-town footprint. The Observatory’s approach to parking is, in effect, an attempt to protect those same qualities by keeping the resort’s mechanical needs as compact and unobtrusive as possible, so the land itself can keep doing the work that drew a luxury developer to Ketchum in the first place.
