11 minute read
HOLIDAY HOME A look at American holiday traditions with Aspen Grange.
Making Memories
Kathryn O’Shea-Evans dishes on HOLIDAY TRADITIONS and how to start your own
By Heather Shoning
WRITER. TRAVELER. Teacher. TV personality. Mermaid (that’s for another time). And recently, Kathryn O’Shea-Evans started an online retail business—Aspen Grange—curating American-made Christmas items with the intent of creating “the most Christmassy place on the internet.” We sat down with O’SheaEvans to talk all things holiday traditions.
Why was finding American-made Christmas decorations vital to you?
I once read that everything in your house should be beautiful and useful, which is so true, and an inspiring way to live. If I’m worried about how a piece was made or the working conditions of the person who made it, I’m less likely to enjoy it. Plus, it’s often better for the environment to buy locally than to have items shipped from farflung lands.
PHOTO: INKLINGS PAPERIE, COURTESY ASPEN GRANGE PHOTOS: COURTESY ASPEN GRANGE
How do traditions and the “things” of Christmas intertwine?
The prettier your Christmas décor, the more memorable your traditions. Think about it: We rarely recall wistfully the meal we shared at a drive-thru window! But when candles are aglow, Eartha Kitt’s voice is casting its romantic spell, a sugary and buttery scent is wafting out of the oven … that’s when you start to make family memories you’ll never forget. Add the dusting of snow that so often comes with a Colorado Christmas season … it’s bliss.
What’s one tradition that defines your Christmases?
Our main Christmas tree is solely decorated with ornaments we buy on our travels (plus the requisite fairy lights). The result may be sparse, especially when the evergreen tops out at 13 feet tall, as it has in recent years. But every year when we decorate it, we unwrap memory after memory … the glimmering peach from our stay in Savannah, Georgia, in a 19th century home under live oaks dripping with spanish moss; the glass ball hand-painted with the Yule Lads, the Icelandic answer to Santa, from our Christmas in Reykjavik and the surrounding countryside; the ornament of the steeples of Assisi, Italy, we purchased during our engagement trip to Rome.
Why should families create traditions if they don’t have them? What’s your top tip you would give someone wanting to create a curated holiday home?
Draw from your best family memories and you can’t go wrong. Visually, it helps to have a consistent color story, so you will want to wend that through each room when possible— perhaps cobalt ribbons woven through your trees and boughs, then picked up in throw pillows and a smattering of ornaments. When kids are old enough, I recommend allowing them their own small tree in their room, ideally something they decorate themself with baubles they make with you at craft time over the years. Even if the tree becomes adorned with something you might not have picked— like dinosaurs and neon string—letting them decorate how they choose is important. It helps instill a love for the season that has nothing to do with toys and everything to do with giggling together and making something beautiful!
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Time spent with loved ones doesn’t cost anything and is how we create the best memories! If you don’t have any fun family traditions, start your own that feel authentically “you.” Maybe it’s whipping up your ancestor’s dreamy cheesecake recipe each Thanksgiving or having everyone in your family put on their pj’s and drive around to ogle Christmas lights while sipping cocoa.
“When we first saw this valley, we were high atop a neighboring ridge, overlooking a panorama of valleys and mountains, forested slopes and rocky peaks. The wildness and solitude of this seemingly uncharted area intrigued us because when you’re down in a valley you don’t have the perspective of space. Once we saw what was around us, our curiosity was piqued. We knew many hardy souls had been here before, but for us, this was new territory.”
Paradise Found
By Kathryn O’Shea-Evans
PLENTY OF FOLKS fantasize about owning their own private island and living large like Sir Richard Branson—owner of 74-acre Necker Island in the B.V.I.—or Ted Turner, who presided over the 4,680-acre St. Phillips Island and its surrounding marshes off the coast of South Carolina for decades. But palm trees and sandy toes weren’t what Bud Knapp and his late wife, Betsy, were after. Instead, the entrepreneurial couple behind tech and media publishing companies (they famously published Architectural Digest and Bon Appétit magazines) and other ventures sought a Rocky Mountain paradise—where they would have snowcapped peaks in lieu of tiki torches, and bighorn sheep and mule deer in lieu of Queen Angelfish and Crayola-bright songbirds. And it was more than a fantasy for the Knapps: like plenty of other things the highly successful duo sought to accomplish in life, they actually did it.
Betsy and Bud Knapp’s first home on the property was a “Minnie Winnie”. They spent a year getting to know the community and researching the history of the land. They hired an impressive team for the project—from architects to designers, craftspeople and artisans, to builders and tradesmen—they inspired them all to think outside the box and gave them free rein to explore their ideas and make use of their skills. In return they gave their best possible work.
PHOTOS: COURTESY KNAPP RANCH “Articulating our conceptual ideas was the easy part; learning how to live in a rural mountain valley was more difficult. Our role was to imbue this place with heart and soul, and to reinforce the concepts of quality, simplicity, and responsible use. We let the land, its history, and the experts advise us on how best to accomplish this.”
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“Knapp Ranch is a 300-plus acre ranch at top of Lake Creek in Edwards,” says Cary Hogan, hospitality and event manager for Knapp Ranch (knappranch.com), who has worked there for two years and knew the pair from her former career as a sommelier long before that. “Bud and Betsy Knapp bought the range in the 1990s…they wanted to see what they could learn from the land, rather than what they get out of the land.” Notably, the Knapp’s “didn’t want to build just another big huge mansion amongst the other ones in Vail” on this pristine patch of earth, with its sagebrush-, aspen- and cottonwood-swathed meadows and jagged, snowcapped peaks. “They wanted to honor the land and history,” Hogan says. “The valley was formed by glaciers; the Ute Indians traveled those mountains in a sunrise direction for thousands of years, and ended up in [this] meadow every summer for thousands of years, celebrating the summer solstice and bounty of the earth, staying there for months before traveling on.”
PHOTOS: COURTESY KNAPP RANCH
—Enrique Martinez Celaya, Artist
PHOTO: CHAD CHISHOLM PHOTOS: COURTESY KNAPP RANCH
The Knapps have curated a collection of sculptures that are displayed on the property as a counterpoint to the natural beauty and organic backdrop created by Mother Nature.
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PHOTOS: COURTESY KNAPP RANCH
Making any new structures worthy of a place with such provenance and eye-candy panoramas of the Gore Range is a difficult task. The couple and their architects looked to legendary locations that were doing it right, including the “Parkitecture” of America’s national park lodges, where open beams, flickering fireplaces and nods to indigenous peoples have stood the test of time. They put up their first cabin “using tools and materials they would have used in 1869,” she says— like fieldstone and Swedish Cope and pieceen-piece log walls (albeit with mountain luxe interiors). Included in the collection of cabins they painstakingly built? One inspired by European building traditions and another that echoes the history of anglers in the area.
And if you think this is just a family vacay spot, think again. The ranch is home to flourishing projects galore. Included among them: gardens that grow everything from beet and amaranth micro greens to squash blossoms for the region’s best restaurants, at a whopping 9,000feet elevation; orchards that produce covetable cultivars of apples (including Sweet Sixteen and FrostBite), plus cherry, pear, apricot and plum; and bees that flit around the greater upper West Lake Creek valley and return to the ranch’s Slovenian bee houses to make their toothsome honey. To pick up a particularly buzzing Knapp Ranch product, try a lip balm or body cream from Knapp’s Nectar—each one that features a Save the Bee symbol gives a portion of proceeds to the Save the Bee partnership working to protect the vital and endangered pollinators. Additionally, you can savor seasonal produce and artisan products at their retail shop, Knapp Harvest in Eagle.
PHOTOS: CHAD CHISHOLM The compound consists of the main house and four cabins—Marmot Guest Lodge, Silver Sal (large photo above), MacPherson (upper left photo) and Anglers (left).
“Our exploration of design ideas included a complete review of our library of Architectural Digest issues, flagging images we liked, and noting why we liked them. Occasionally, we simply liked the composition. More often, materials, fenestration, indoor-outdoor relationship or the architecture caught our eye. We learned how to describe what we liked, and why. The fact that we could talk about it together resulted in a building program that we both agreed upon.”
—Betsy Knapp
While the public cannot currently visit Knapp Ranch, Hogan can confirm: it is exquisite. “Animals are everywhere—bears, mountain lions, foxes, deer—that kind of thing,” she says. “But also the evidence of glacier activity from these big huge monolithic rocks that are plopped in meadows or next to beautiful streams.” And it’s as busy making the world a better place as it is beautiful. “We restored a stream bed, part of a the federal Forest Stewardship Program; we are working on cancer [fighting] cream; you could dig into almost any different area [here that] might spark your interest,” Hogan says.
As Betsy and Bud Knapp wrote in their recent book, Living Beneath the Colorado Peaks: The Story of Knapp Ranch (The Knapp Press, 2018), “This is a place of incredible adventure and a tiny bit of danger. Lightning strikes on the ridge. Bears nibbling in the bushes. Mountain lions scouting the stream bank. We are more alive here than anywhere else that we have lived. There is a higher power at work here that encourages, even reminds us, to think of our mortality and respect of nature.” To top it all off, come autumn, “the leaves are just fantastic,” Hogan says. Paradise, indeed.
