By Suzanne Davis
Every megawatt hotelier knows how vital it is to stand apart from the pack. That’s especially true in a town like Aspen, which has been luring the cognoscenti for decades. To that end, the people behind The Little Nell—founded in 1989—decided to do things differently from the very beginning.
“I was inspired to make several changes after visiting Hotel Post Lech am Arlberg in Lech, Austria, a small, family-owned hotel that’s famous throughout the world for being simple yet extraordinary, with incredible service,” recalls The Little Nell’s first general manager, Eric Calderon. Calderon’s biggest change to the originally planned course: rechristening the suites. “I decided to name the presidential suite The Little Nell Suite. And then I thought, why don’t we try to name all the big suites after people that contributed in one form or another to Aspen?”
Calderon and his team looked to some of the town’s most notable people and families for inspiration—and reached out by letter to get their blessings. Included among those honored with a namesake suite: Fritz Benedict, a protégée of starchitect Frank Lloyd Wright who designed more than 200 modernist buildings in Aspen, including the 1956 Bank of Aspen building (now home to Wells Fargo and every bit a nod to Wright); Fred Iselin, a Swiss expat turned skiing instructor who pioneered the sport in his 40-year reign over Aspen and Snowmass ski schools; and Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, the Chicago couple who spearheaded Aspen’s cultural revival, founding everything from the Aspen Music Festival to the International Design Conference in Aspen.
Given the prestige of each of these families, Calderon knew he had his work cut out for him—the Paepcke name was a bit thorny to secure—but he never gave up. And in many cases, he had to look no further than his own lobby to seal the deal.
Eric Calderon’s letter to Pfeifer in 1989.
“Elizabeth Paepcke was alive—in her 90s—but she had no interest in letting me use her name,” Calderon says. However, like skinning up a mountain to ski back down, Calderon’s persistence paid off. “I had to work on her. She would come to lunch at the hotel, and I would spend time chatting with her. She loved our bread. And so, for about a year, I sent bread to her home once a week. And, finally, she wrote me a note and said, ‘Eric, I will, but only because of the bread.’”
By comparison, Friedl Pfeifer, a former Austrian ski racer who co-founded the Aspen Ski Corp. (now the Aspen Skiing Company) with the Paepckes, took almost no convincing at all. “He had stopped skiing because of his age, but he liked to hang out in The Little Nell’s lobby every morning in a ski suit, just to be part of the scene,” Calderon says. “He would engage in conversation with our guests, with really anybody that would walk by. It was the highlight of his day, I think. And he graciously let us use his name on one of our large suites.”
More than 35 years later, The Little Nell has been revamped—and continues to wow. Interiors of the hotel’s six Luxury Suites have been reborn again and again, with ultra-luxe amenities that range from Fili D’Oro down comforters to 2,000-square-foot floor plans and slopeside balconies ideal for après-ski. With every new iteration, the suites’ original monikers have held up, an especially fitting detail in a hotel whose very history is rooted in the lore of Aspen itself.
“A name is so meaningful to me—I think it stems from my European background,” says Henning Rahm, The Little Nell’s current general manager—and only the fifth general manager in the hotel’s 35 years. The names are a conversation starter for guests, he says. “There are guests who are extremely interested in coming to Aspen and learning more about its history and understanding how it originated,” he says. “For us, here in the hotel world, that’s where my storytelling starts. I have the opportunity to relate back to our suites and tell the story of what Aspen was, what it has become, and why—and that creates an even more meaningful sense of place.”
