A public-private entity on Thursday closed on the sale of the iconic Stanley Hotel and its 41-acre Estes Park campus, in a complex deal that will jump-start development of the Stanley Film Center and likely cast the hotel in a bigger role when the Sundance Film Festival moves to Boulder in 2027.

The Stanley property was purchased by the Stanley Partnership for Art, Culture and Education LLC (SPACE) through a public-private partnership among the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority, private bond investors, former owner John Cullen and new manager Sage Hospitality Group.

Cullen, whose Grand Heritage Hotel Group owned the 117-year-old, 140-room hotel for 30 years, will serve as CEO of SPACE and share its governing board, steering a regional economic and cultural engine expected to amplify tourism in Estes Park and Colorado. “I have owned The Stanley for almost 30 years and can’t imagine a better way to both preserve and grow it for generations to come,” Cullen said in a prepared statement.Reached Thursday afternoon, Cullen said the next step is that “we start construction, moving dirt inside the next six to eight weeks. We have a guaranteed delivery date of roughly three years from today — and I think we’ll beat it.”

The imposition of tariffs on foreign-produced materials by the Trump administration and changes in the bond market presented challenges in getting the deal and the project across the finish line, he said.

“We were looking at trying to get this done before Thanksgiving, when the bond market was 60 basis points in our favor. Time is truly money,” Cullen said. “Nevertheless, the bonds sold, and we shouldn’t be too upset with our success.”

Cullen hailed the foresight of general contractor Saunders Construction Inc. of Englewood for mitigating the effects of tariffs.

“Tariffs obviously make things cost more, so I have to find steel I-beams that go across the theater,” Cullen said. “Those aren’t made here anymore. They’re coming from somewhere outside the U.S.

“But we hedged our bets early on a guaranteed maximum-price contract through Saunders, and they pre-purchsased a lot of the stuff that was mission critical to us,” he said. “We’re very fortunate to have them as a very over-the-horizon partner that looked at this as a three- to four-year project.”

Besides continuing the hotel’s current operations, the nearly $400 million bond offering also will fund a 65-room expansion of the two historic lodging buildings and a new 65,000-square-foot event center including an 864-person auditorium and a horror film museum curated by Blumhouse Productions LLC, featuring new exhibits approximately every other month.

Blumhouse, the production company behind horror films and franchises such as “Get Out,” “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” “The Purge” and “Paranormal Activity,” will serve as the Stanley Film Center’s exclusive exhibit curator.

Blumhouse and its parent companies NBCUniversal Media LLC and Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA) agreed on a deal to let the Stanley host four film festivals — with a new movie launched at each — over the next year. Blumhouse and affiliated streaming-video service Peacock took over the hotel last fall for a series of “Overnightmare” events, offering four different two-night experiences, each with horror movie-themed interactive challenges and film screenings.

The Stanley also will host the Sundance Institute’s 2025 Directors Lab starting next week. When the institute put on its 2024 Directors Lab program at the Stanley last year, state officials have said that experience helped tip the scales in favor of Colorado for luring the Sundance Film Festival away from its longtime home in Park City, Utah.

The event center will be funded in part through a $46 million sales tax increment pledge from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade and the Colorado Economic Development Commission’s Regional Tourism Act program. Within OEDIT, the Business Funding and Incentives Division and the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media worked to ensure the success of the project, and the EDC also approved a $1 million grant to support the purchase of the hotel by CECFA, which was established by the Colorado General Assembly in 1981.

The hotel, which was built in 1909 by inventor Freelan Oscar Stanley and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, inspired Stephen King’s novel “The Shining” and its 1980 horror-movie adaptation by director Stanley Kubrick, and has capitalized on the macabre theme with horror film festivals and, in 2023, Cullen’s purchase of Nederland’s quirky Frozen Dead Guy Days festival and the opening of a cryonics museum in the hotel’s historic ice house that houses the frozen corpse of the festival’s namesake, Norwegian Bredo Morstoel.

Cullen told BizWest in October that the cryonics museum also would get transferred to the state under the deal that closed Thursday. That facility remains under lease to the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based nonprofit Alcor Life Extension Foundation, he said, and “they own the frozen dead guy.” The town now owns the festival through its Visit Estes Park tourism district, which receives all of the proceeds.

The hotel for years also has used its haunted reputation to lead “ghost tours” through the property.

“We are excited about the future of the Stanley Hotel and Film Center,” Jeff Kraft, OEDIT’s deputy director, said in a prepared statement. “Through new partnerships, this historic venue is generating interest in locating film productions in Colorado, showcasing the region’s many amenities to a national audience and driving revenue from new out-of-state visitors. By supporting the new ownership structure, we have an opportunity to grow these activities and realize the vision for this Regional Tourism Act project as one that boosts out-of-state tourism, contributes to the local economy and creates jobs for Coloradans.”

Besides Englewood-based Saunders, contractors for the expansion include Denver-based MOA Architecture, Alexandria, Va.-based hospitality consultant RevPar International and Centennial-based construction consultant 4Site Advisors.

“The Stanley Hotel represents everything we look for in a landmark property: a rich history, innovative programming and deep community connections,” Daniel del Olmo, president and co-CEO of Sage Hospitality Group, said in a news release. “We see so much opportunity and look forward to creating memorable guest experiences” as the property’s new manager.

Added Mark Heller, CECFA executive director and SPACE chief administrative officer, “These improvements and programming innovations will elevate The Stanley’s impact economically and culturally. Just as importantly, this project will generate approximately $45 million over the term of the bonds to support the public educational and cultural missions of CECFA and SPACE, which will be the stewards of The Stanley forever.”

The roughly $70 million film center project began in 2015, fueled by millions of dollars in Colorado Regional Tourism Act incentives, but development had been hampered by construction delays, cost increases and the COVID-19 pandemic, which essentially shut down the hospitality industry for several months in 2020.

Cullen’s Grand Heritage agreed to a concession that converts its $52 million equity stake in the Stanley into junior bonds “whose principal and interest are only paid from residual project revenue each year after all other obligations are met,” state documents show.

“The best part,” Cullen told BizWest last fall, “is that not a single taxpayer dollar is going into this. It’s all privately funded bonds — but all the benefit goes to the taxpayers.

“All profits will go to arts programs in public schools in Colorado for fifth through eighth grades. They’ll be called Stanley grants, and they’ll be awarded by CECFA every year,” he said, adding that when the bonds retire in 20 to 35 years, “it’s $50 million a year to public-school arts programs. In the meantime, they get between 6% and 8% of the hotel’s profits as the bonds get paid off.”

House Bill 1295, the Creative Industry Community Revitalization Incentives legislation, was passed by Colorado lawmakers in May 2024, helping to pave the way for CECFA to develop the plan to buy the Stanley from Grand Heritage and see the hotel’s film center completed after more than a decade of starts and stops.

The return from the transaction for Grand Heritage is “all in bonds,” Cullen said. “I don’t get any cash from the sale. Whatever I take, I take in bonds at the back of the line. I’m essentially the equity in the bondholder group.”

Cullen said his work as chairman of the SPACE board would be “for free, as a volunteer,” and added that “I promise to spend at least half my time living just behind the Stanley.”

The primary thing Cullen gets out of the deal, he said, “is complete validation” of what he spent three decades of his life doing. “I’ll work for free, but I’ll get to live every single one of my dreams out and see the Stanley become a self-sustainable hotel that exceeds my wildest imagination.

“I bought it out of bankruptcy,” Cullen said. “There were dirt roads, holes in the roof, and 11 of the 14 buildings didn’t have utilities, and it was generating just $1.4 million in annual gross revenue. I walked into this hotel at the age of 31, and if somebody told me then I’m going to spend 29 years owning it and the next 35 building and developing it, I wouldn’t have been crazy to go back to Stapleton Airport and say this is too hard.

“But now we’re turning it over to the state in pristine condition,” he said. “We spent $70 million renovating it … and it now generates $44 million a year in revenues and is one of the top 20 social media-followed hotels in the world.”

For Cullen, the commitment to Estes Park has been ongoing. Last September, his Grand Heritage closed on the $35 million sale of its Fall River Village resort to the Estes Park Housing Authority to meet the tourism-dependent mountain village’s continued need for workforce housing.

“I’ve spent 30 years in Estes Park and realize how important the Stanley is to the town, in terms of its workforce, its tourism and its image,” Cullen said. When the hotel and film center project is completed, he added, “it will be half of the town’s revenues.

“It will be more security for the town of Estes Park by giving it to the state,” Cullen said. “That will mean Estes Park’s two biggest tourism draws, Rocky Mountain National Park and the Stanley, will be controlled permanently by the government. What better security than that.”

The Stanley was the seventh of 51 hotels Grand Heritage acquired, “but this is the one I kept, and it’s never failed me — through floods, pandemics, fires, wars, whatever,” Cullen said. “I’ve never given up on the Stanley, and it’s never given up on me.

“The Stanley will be my last hotel. I now hand it off, but I still have responsibility for curating it for 35 more years. At the end of the day, I will have worked 64 years at the Stanley — four times longer than F.O. Stanley himself did.

“But at the end of the day, it’s not about me, but it’s about fifth- through eighth-grade kids,” Cullen said. “I have this dream that one of them will be on the stage at the Oscars, saying ‘I want to thank the Stanley for helping my career.’”

This article was first published by BizWest, an independent news organization, and is published under a license agreement. © 2025 BizWest Media LLC.