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Developer Envisions Year-Round Resort in Grand County, Colo.

By Jason Blevins, The Denver Post
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News 

Jun. 3--GRANBY, Colo.--Marise Cipriani leans forward over her steering wheel and peers at the muddy hill dropping from underneath her front tires. 

"Do you think we can make it?" she says, warily eyeing the steep jeep trail. A little skidding. The back end swings a bit, but the gentle terrain at the bottom of the hill catches the truck and all is well. 

It's a rare glimpse of timidity in Cipriani, an entrepreneur, mother, pilot, real estate developer and workaholic whose extraordinary plans for a mega-resort in quiet Grand County are coming to fruition. 

Six years ago, a major marketing firm sent representatives to stroll Cipriani's 5,000-acre ranch surrounding the troubled Silver Creek ski area she had just purchased for $12.5 million. She wanted a four-season playground -- a vacationland with golfing, fishing, skiing and dense islands of development in a sea of open space. 

The marketing team told her to scrap the plan and divide the massive parcel into ranchettes and sell homesites. 

Cipriani nodded and then charged head-first into a $100 million plan to build some 5,000 residential units, a wellness center, a golf course or two, and a rustic village with decidedly unrustic amenities. All at the base of her serpentine ski hill. Call it one-stop park-and-play for the vacationing family. When the project's final screw is turned in 20-plus years, the ranch will be worth an estimated $600 million. 

Along with her husband Celso and two children, Cipriani owns a marina on Grand Lake, a short drive from the ranch and ski area she recently renamed SolVista. She also owns Berthoud Pass ski area, a 30-minute drive in the other direction, and is moving into her second round of residential development at SolVista. 

And the Brazilian businesswoman with a family tree laden with savvy risk-takers is only getting started. 

Cipriani points across her ranch, across the elk-nibbled golf course, across the meandering Fraser River, to the peaks of the Continental Divide. Unspoiled meadows roll into dense forests splayed at the foot of towering peaks. 

"I think Grand County is the future," she says. "I think the greatest advantage we have in Grand County is that we can learn from the mistakes of others and also use what we know works." 

Despite boasting three of Colorado's largest lakes, a national park, three ski slopes and a plethora of recreational opportunities not two hours from downtown Denver, Grand County has yet to endure the explosive growing pains of its colleagues to the west, namely Summit and Eagle counties. 

Cipriani, while acknowledging that the lack of development is certainly an appealing aspect of the region, promises she is not planning to follow in the steps of Summit and Eagle counties. Instead, she plans to create her own utopia by using plenty of open space, an amenity she has paid handsomely for. 

"I feel it's the right thing to do," she says. "We will do enough to get our investment back and make some money. It's not like we have to make three times our money." 

To gauge Cipriani's sincerity and intense drive, look back at her family history. Beginning with her grandfather, her family's entrepreneurial spirit has become the stuff of legends in her home country. 

Her grandfather, Atilio Fontana, was born to Italian immigrants in Concordia, a small town in southern Brazil. As a child he labored on a farm, moving hay and feeding livestock. With his small savings, he bought pigs and raised them for slaughter. Every so often he would load his pigs onto a train for the grueling three-day ride to market in Sao Paulo, where he would sell his bounty and buy glassware and other trinkets needed back home. 

Selling the housewares and trinkets gave him money for more pigs, and he moved into raising chickens and then cattle. Soon he was organizing cooperatives, buying chickens and cattle for neighbors who raised the animals for Fontana to sell at the Sao Paulo market. 

That practice is still alive today in Concordia, which is now home to one of the country's largest meat-processing businesses. 

Fontana sent his son, Omar, to boarding school in Sao Paulo. Omar Fontana, Cipriani's father, helped pay for his school by working at an airport, where he quickly developed an affinity for airplanes. 

Against his father's wishes, Omar Fontana earned his pilot's license. His father wanted him to help with the growing business back in Concordia, but Omar Fontana wanted to fly. 

At the airport in Sao Paulo, there was an airplane that sat unused on Sundays. Omar Fontana, caught between his father's desire and his own yen for the sky, sated both desires with that plane. 

In the early 1950s, a young Omar Fontana started spending his Sundays ferrying his father's livestock from Concordia to Sao Paulo. Soon he was selling passenger seats on the Sunday flights. In 1953, he bought a pair of DC-3s. Two years later, the year his daughter Marise was born, Fontana was flying regularly scheduled flights across the country. Thus was born Brazil's third-largest airline, TransBrasil. 

Omar Fontana died in December 2000, with Brazilian newspapers lamenting the loss of a Brazilian hero, entrepreneur, lawyer, pilot, musician and avid sports fan. 

Marise Cipriani lived in Sao Paulo until 1979, when she married a lawyer with her father's airlines, where she was working in the marketing department. The couple moved to Miami and had two children, a girl and a boy. They had an airstrip in the orchard behind their home and Cipriani earned her pilot's license. 

Today, she regularly flies between her office at SolVista and her Boulder home. She says flying relaxes her, mainly because it's one of the few times when she can focus on a single endeavor. 

In 1986, urbanites Celso and Marise Cipriani first visited Colorado. Three years later, the couple bought two homes in a then-struggling Beaver Creek. In 1994, the couple was traveling around the state when they found the shuttered Silver Creek ski area, which had been languishing in bankruptcy and receivership for eight years. They bought it. 

Today, the ranchland is bustling. Nine holes of golf will be open next month. Construction has begun on the back nine and a pair of reservoirs. A new lift is planned. The new village is taking shape. Homeowners are closing on new condos at the Kicking Horse Lodge. 

Kicking Horse was built by Beaver Creek-based Ironwood Builders, whose owners at first balked at the idea of building in Grand County. 

"We originally passed on it when she asked us to become involved," said Jack Koson, who with partner Terry Staples has become known for building super-luxury homes in the million-dollar-plus range. "We really didn't think we could do it. But Marise persevered and we looked at it in greater depth and saw an opportunity." 

That opportunity became cash in April 2000, when 97 of 115 units sold out in a single weekend, months before hammer even met nail. 

Koson and Staples reluctantly passed again on Cipriani's second round of development, the Twin Saddles Lodge, a mixed-use residential and commercial village at the base of the SolVista ski area. The duo is involved in three projects and couldn't make time. 

So Cipriani is moving forward as her own developer for the Twin Saddles project. 

"She's done a lot of things right. Mainly that she's built the fundamentals," says Koson, who is planning to continue developing at SolVista. "So many other developers do it with smoke and mirrors, saying, "There's going to be a golf course here; there's going to be ski access here.' The best thing about SolVista is that I don't have to promise anything to anybody. It's already there." 

From 1995 to 1999, it appeared as though Cipriani was just lying back and waiting. In fact, she was planning. Under the guidance of the Bureau of Land Management, the state Division of Wildlife, Rocky Mountain National Park and the Forest Service, she was hunting down ranches and land the agencies were coveting. Once she had spent $7 million on five parcels in northwest Colorado, she traded the 2,809 acres for a 1,064-acre island of BLM land inside her ranch that the BLM had already designated as a tradeable parcel. 

"That was a wonderful exchange for us," said Linda Gross, the field manager at the BLM's Kremmling office. "It was an ideal exchange. Mrs. Cipriani is very focused and she knows where she is going. My experience with her on this trade is that she was a very astute businesswoman." 

Cipriani also backed away from a troublesome brouhaha with her neighbors over the use of the name Silver Creek. She said it was the name of her ranch and other developers on private parcels inside and outside the ranch could not use the name. The developers said Silver Creek was a geographic location. 

Instead of battling, Cipriani simply changed the name of her ranch to SolVista. 

But it's not like she ran from the fight. It's more like she chose not to fight. For a woman who works 20 hours a day, it's good to choose your fights carefully, she says. 

That's a lesson from her father. Another lesson: Avoid debt. Her ranch is moving forward only with the money it generates. And the ball is already rolling, the momentum building. 

Despite having struggled and stressed for six years to get her project in motion, Cipriani is not going to sit back and rest. 

"I've believed in something so much and for a while there, I had to operate on 100 percent faith," she says. "It's been a long six years. I've learned a lot. One of my biggest lessons? As a developer, I think, it was tough to learn how to really trust myself. Here we'd hired a major firm that only does marketing studies for resorts, and we had spent thousands and thousands of dollars on months and months of work and they said it wouldn't work. So I had to work on faith and I had to learn to trust myself." 

-----To see more of The Denver Post, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.denverpost.com 

(c) 2001, The Denver Post. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. 


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