High Points

Celebrated for its prime skiing, natural beauty and celebrity habitués, Aspen is forging a heady new identity as a world-renowned cultural hub all year round.

- Andrea Black

Aspen is well-known as a luxe ski destination but once the snow has melted, and the skis and snowboards are stored away, this Colorado mountain town positively blooms. And it’s not just the fields of wildflowers that blanket the mountains in a kaleidoscope of colors, the towns of Aspen and nearby Snowmass offer a more cultural bent in the warmer months; one that is quite unique.

On a walking tour of Aspen’s leafy West End, Nina Gabianelli from Aspen Historical Society points out a house conceived by Bauhaus artist and designer Herbert Bayer – his work is peppered throughout this historic district. He left a lasting mark on this mountain resort town, one that is being celebrated in this, the 100year anniversary of Bauhaus, and beyond, no doubt.

How did an esteemed alumnus of the Bauhaus school, which was quashed by the Nazis in 1933, come to settle in Aspen? By then it was practically a ghost town with the silver mining boom long gone. In the 1940s industrialist Walter Paepcke and his wife Elizabeth, founders of the Aspen Institute, envisioned a mountain resort with its own resident cultural attractions. They lured Herbert, a polymath (he designed houses, created sculptures, decorated tea sets!) to town from his new home in New York. Raised in the Austrian Alps, Herbert loved Aspen’s natural surroundings and ended up living in the town and creating works from 1946 to 1975.