Construction Management, Four Seasons Private Residences

In August of 2011 I was contacted regarding a project that I had seen a few years before on the drafting table at Hill-Glazier Architects.  The project was the Four Seasons Resort in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and I had wanted to work on it ever since I saw it on the drafting table that day.  The project was suddenly moving into construction and in need of a project manager.  I accepted the position and in September of that year found myself living in Wyoming and managing what was then (and may still be) the largest habitable structure ever built in the state of Wyoming.  It was a unique project in many ways and in addition to the Four Seasons hotel contained 17 private residences, 7 of which resided on the penthouse level of the hotel and another 10 in an adjacent structure.  The units were priced from $3 to $7+ million and ranged from 2,500 square feet to over 5,000 square feet.  One of the things that made this project so unique was the fact that the penthouse units were not designed at the time the hotel was designed and so each of the 7 penthouse units became very much of a design-build project working around existing structural elements and a multitude of design constraints.  Another unique factor was that, due to a dispute between the owner and the interior designer, we were given one elevation for each room of each private residence.  Much of my work became extrapolating the balance of each rooms’ architectural design from other similar rooms or from verbal conversations with the designer and then communicating that to the contractor and subcontractors, all the while trying to eliminate construction cost change orders.  Beyond the above challenges we also faced the challenges of working in weather up to 20 degrees below zero, heavy snowfalls, and closures of the portions of the property bordering the ski slopes during ski seasons.