Mollie Aspen by Post Company and CCY Architects

Post Company and CCY Architects collaborated on Mollie Aspen – a 68-key boutique hotel in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains that taps into the town’s Bauhaus legacy and alpine identity through a contemporary and contextually relevant lens.

Aspen is widely associated with its world- class slopes, upscale township and captivating terrain. Nineteenth-century Victorian homes are synonymous with the vernacular, which is interspersed with a striking, seasonally diverse topography. “Aspen is contained and dramatic,” says Post Company’s Ruben Caldwell. “The mountains rise directly above you and the built environment there is very special.”

Eager to avoid cliched or expected tropes, specifically in relation to alpine design, Post Company leaned heavily into this history when conceiving Mollie’s interiors.

One of the town’s lesser-known hallmarks is its strong ties to the Bauhaus movement, which exist thanks to Herbert Bayer – an Austrian-American artist and architect commissioned in the 1940s by Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, Aspen’s modern-day founders, to transform the then-abandoned silver mining town into a post-war cultural destination. Bayer’s scope, redolent of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius’s vision for the totality of design, included logos and posters as well as landscapes and buildings, many of which have been preserved.

Eager to avoid cliched or expected tropes, specifically in relation to alpine design, Post Company leaned heavily into this history when conceiving Mollie’s interiors. “Everyone is designing to the same rather shallow concept of what defines a place, region or neighbourhood; it’s not something that’s unique to mountain towns, but it’s particularly hard to escape there, so uncovering Aspen’s ties to Bauhaus was like finding gold,” says Caldwell.

Natural timbers, hand-dyed fabrics and geometric lines inspired by a grid-like Anni Albers textile collide in a space that is both craft driven and exacting.

The interiors represent an informed interpretation of the movement’s tenets, without being too obvious. Natural timbers, hand-dyed fabrics and geometric lines inspired by a grid-like Anni Albers textile collide in a space that is both craft driven and exacting. “We wanted our approach to the design to be rigorous, which means that it’s highly organised and the grid system continues as a loose overlay through the interior architecture and design,” says Caldwell.

Moulded timber ceilings, custom joinery, sand-cast solid brass lighting fixtures and terracotta tiles all bring further gravitas to the contemporary design, and windows frame views of snowy outcrops and slithers of the surrounding township. The CCY Architects-designed exterior – a rationalised form clad in sustainably harvested radiata pine – is intentionally contemporary. Caldwell describes it as having “a modern bent” – a move gladly embraced in contrast against Aspen’s diverse heritage design language.

Moulded timber ceilings, custom joinery, sand-cast solid brass lighting fixtures and terracotta tiles all bring further gravitas to the contemporary design.

As well as working closely with CCY Architects and developer HayMax Capital, Post Company spearheaded the hotel’s branding and graphics. It’s a cohesive approach that not only gleans a full and diligent hospitality experience deeply rooted in a set of design principles, but it’s a fitting tip of the cap to Bayer and the Paepckes’ vision for Aspen prescribed some 80 years ago.

Architecture by CCY Architects. Interior design and branding by Post Company. Development by HayMax Capital. Artwork by Rachel Snack, Virginie Hucher and Matthew Johnson.