At the lowest level of a home in King’s Crown, the ski-in/ski-out community at the base of Park City Mountain Resort, a glowing bar channels the one where Jack Torrance shares a drink with Lloyd, the impeccably polite—and very dead—bartender of the Overlook Hotel. There’s an eerie, green bathroom, another rendered in red and enough carefully planted clues to make a Stanley Kubrick fan feel like they’ve been here before.
Architect Gregory Walker and his team at WOW Atelier master-planned King’s Crown, but this particular home offered an opportunity to get weird. All work and no play this is not: The lower level was conceived as an entertainment space, particularly during Sundance.
Walker, however, wasn’t interested in building a movie set. “We’re not aspiring to make objects, or to be ‘dancing monkeys’ reproducing The Shining,” he says. The question was whether architecture could summon the feeling of Kubrick’s film without simply copying it.
The idea emerged through conversations with homeowners Jay and Colleen Veltz, an artist and product designer whose children were headed to film school. The family loved Kubrick, but Colleen had a more personal connection. As a child, she stayed at the hotel associated with the film, where her younger sister accidentally became locked in an adjoining room. Colleen slipped playing cards beneath the door to keep her occupied until help arrived.
Perhaps she had always been a guest at the Overlook.
The references are strongest downstairs. Ascend through the house and Kubrick gradually loosens his grip: living spaces calm, bedrooms grow quieter, until the journey ends in Colleen’s bright, airy top-floor art studio.
The house, as Walker puts it, “ascended from hell.”
No Detail Overlooked
For The Shining, Stanley Kubrick had the doors of the Overlook Hotel sets built as working doors rather than lightweight movie props. He had Jack Nicholson hack through 60 of them until he got the take he wanted. Gregory Walker and his team decided the only reasonable response was to return the favor.
They scoured books about The Shining, studying its colors, patterns and architectural details. For the lower level, they tracked down the U.S. rights holder for the Overlook Hotel’s unmistakable carpet pattern and secured permission to reproduce it. Toilets were custom-colored to match the bathrooms. Lighting at the bar was painstakingly designed to glow upward onto guests’ faces rather than simply shine down from above.
And the references didn’t stop in the basement. A geometric pattern from the film reappears as a brass inlay in a custom-designed bed upstairs—a piece Walker estimates required roughly 10 lengthy design sessions with the homeowners.
“It’s a journey—honestly, a lot like making a film,” Walker says. “Cuts, edits, takes, constant iteration.”
The point of all that obsessing wasn’t perfect imitation. It was atmosphere. “Could you, through physical space, feel transported into that story?” Walker asks. In the bathroom, from room 237 in the film, especially, he thinks they got there: “Even now, walking into that green bathroom gives me chills.”
