Getting your player ready...
When Toni and Milt McPeek and their kids drove up to Grand County in 2012 to search out a resort property, they had no idea they’d end up married to the concept. The couple not only ended up buying a new two-bedroom condo at Ten Mile Creek in Granby Ranch, but last year welcomed 200 guests at the top of Granby Ranch’s ski lift for a mountaintop wedding for their son M.J. and his bride Lydia.
“We just love the mountains; we always want to be up there,” says Toni McPeek, who spent last weekend moving out of their first condo and heading into a new, big 3-bedroom unit in Ten Mile Creek’s newest Reserve neighborhood (you can see two models today), which accessed by a private drive. The seven-person moving party all slept comfortably in the new condo afterward. The McPeeks are now among four families in The Reserve who have doubled-down on their mountain purchases, opting to buy even bigger homes there. Jim Houston, who will take you around The Reserve’s newest two- and three-bedroom homes today priced from the mid-$200s, says the popularity has to do with a well-crafted resort lifestyle that provides family-friendly recreation, but also offers mountain vistas right around the units themselves. “I walk this every day and I still say, ‘Wow, this is really beautiful,'” Houston said, pointing across a conservation easement wrapping The Reserve’s newest buildings, to where a distant elk was crossing the snow toward a streambed. In addition to a dwindling number of new three-bedrooms, he’ll show you a new two-bedroom unit that can work as a double master suite plan, one suite with a private door to a deck, as well as a ‘Treehouse’ two-story model with a wide main-floor level that runs 29 feet from entry foyer to fireplace, set against timber, granite and rock detailing; and an upstairs level where both bedroom suites get two-sided views. All of The Reserve’s newest homes come with a granite kitchen with pendant lights, a stone fireplace beneath a chinked-wood mantel, eye-catching plank floors, rubbed-bronze fixtures and covered decks. “We were thinking about a cabin; we had never really thought about a condo,” recalls Toni McPeek of their exploratory trip that turned up Granby Ranch and The Reserve. “But it’s been fantastic; no maintenance. We can be there in two hours, you walk in and have a nice place.” As the family grows, everybody is using it, she adds: daughter Cassie, just out of the Air Force Academy and headed for flight training; son Michael, a junior in high school, playing Granby Ranch’s 18-hole golf course; everybody enjoying the skiing and snowboarding, and hikes with the dog during summer. You’ll see those family oriented amenities that come with Reserve ownership – including the ski mountain; base lodge with its Granby Ranch Grille where the wedding reception was held; cross-country trails; and a private fishing reserve on the Fraser River; all just 12 minutes from Devil’s Thumb and a few minutes more from Winter Park, Mary Jane and from boating on Granby Reservoir. Granby Ranch is just 90 minutes from downtown.