Designed for the View & Casual Open-Air Living

Front elevation of 89 Pritchel Place at dusk, glass entry lit from within, Cordillera Summit, Colorado

The Architect — Brian Judge and the Valley’s Quiet Modernists

Brian Judge founded his practice in Vail in 1996. It began as a one-person studio. Three decades later, Judge + Associates Architects & Planners works from an office on Potato Patch Drive and has become one of the firms people name when they talk about how the Vail Valley actually looks.

That reputation was not built on a signature flourish. It was built on restraint.

Look through the firm’s portfolio (the Vail River House, designed to frame moving water; the Mountaintop Modern Log Estate, where traditional log construction meets contemporary volume; the Thistle and Rose Residence; Castle Peak Gate) and a method emerges. The site comes first. Topography, climate, and sightlines are studied before a form is proposed. The firm’s own word for it is contextual: homes that respond to the alpine environment rather than being imposed on it.

In practice that produces a recognizable vocabulary. Warm timber against expansive glass. Heavy structure left visible instead of buried in drywall. Natural stone that starts outside and keeps going. Roofs shaped by what they are protecting and what they are trying not to block.

The work has been recognized accordingly: named to Mountain Living’s Top Mountain Architects list across more than a decade, multiple Best of Houzz awards, and features in Luxe Interiors + Design, Aspen Peak, and The Denver Post. You can browse the full body of work in the Judge + Associates portfolio.

There is a practical consequence for a buyer. Custom mountain homes in Eagle County are not scarce. Custom mountain homes where someone made real decisions (where the roofline exists for a reason, where the beams are carrying load, where the stone was chosen to do two jobs in two rooms) are scarcer.

Custom mountain homes in Eagle County are not scarce. Ones where every decision was actually made are.

Which brings us to a ridge in Cordillera Summit.

The Home — 89 Pritchel Place

Aerial view of the butterfly roofline at 89 Pritchel Place, Cordillera Summit, Edwards, Colorado
The roof folds outward rather than up, a butterfly profile that opens the elevation instead of capping it.

The approach tells you what kind of house this is before you reach the door. Standing in the motor court, you are already looking past the great room and out the far side of the house toward the mountains. That is not an accident of siting. That is the plan.

The roof that gets out of the way

The defining exterior gesture is the roof. Rather than carrying a conventional ridge across the main volume, which would have pushed mass up exactly where the view is, the architecture folds. The central roof planes lift outward and away in a butterfly profile that opens the elevation instead of capping it.

The effect from inside is the point. Views are significantly more open. Clerestory windows sit above the sliding walls, and light arrives from two heights at once. Where a traditional roofline would have delivered a wall, this one delivers sky.

Light where houses usually give up

At the front of the residence the architects did something most mountain homes do not bother to do. Rather than accept a dim lower level, the standard compromise in hillside construction, the design cuts an architectural light well into the front of the home. Roughly twenty feet of glazing drops daylight down through the structure, feeding both the main level and the living areas below.

You notice the result before you understand the cause. Descend the under-lit floating staircase and the lower level continues the home’s thoughtful design, with real daylight and comfortable living spaces.

Structure you can see

Inside, the great room opens to a vaulted ceiling carried on heavy dark timber beams that fan out from the ridge, with exposed structural steel where steel is doing the work.

In a great many luxury homes the beams are decorative: timber glued around a hidden member. Here the structure is the architecture, and the room feels resolved rather than merely large.

Vaulted great room with exposed timber beams and floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace at 89 Pritchel Place, Cordillera Summit
The stone that wraps the exterior, carried indoors and run floor-to-vault.

Wide-plank European oak runs underfoot. Glass railings edge the stair opening so the volume stays continuous. The glazing is Pella throughout, set into dark frames that draw the eye out instead of stopping it.

The great room — one space, three functions

Kitchen, dining, and living occupy a single continuous volume, and the plan is unmistakably built around gathering.

That is the floor plan performing exactly as it was drawn. No bottleneck. Nobody stranded in a formal room by themselves.

Open living, dining, and kitchen area reading as one continuous room
The sightline from the sofa runs the length of the house and out the far glazing.

Picture it in late December. The island disappears under food. Someone is opening wine at the far end. The dining table (with room for eight and then some) is set but nobody has sat down yet, because people are drifting between the kitchen, the fire, and the doors to the Upper Stone Patio, and nobody wants to be the one who stops the conversation.

The appliance package is specified rather than assembled: a Sub-Zero refrigerator, a Wolf range, and dual Cove dishwashers, the second one being the detail that only reveals its value the first time you host twenty people.

Custom oak kitchen with large stone island, Sub-Zero refrigerator and Wolf range
Custom oak cabinetry, full height, with a stone slab island and prep surface to spare.

A substantial island anchors the room, seating on one side and a genuinely usable expanse of prep surface on the other. Just off the kitchen sits a private office, walk-in pantry, mudroom, laundry area, and access to the three-car garage. It is a service core placed where it is actually needed, which is the kind of decision that never photographs well and matters every single day.

One stone, inside and out

The most quietly sophisticated decision in the house is a material one. The pale natural limestone that wraps the base of the exterior does not stop at the wall. It continues indoors and rises the full height of the great room as the fireplace: a floor-to-vault mass of stacked ashlar with a long linear firebox set into it and a blackened steel beam running across.

The consequence is that the home reads as one object. Standing inside, the fireplace is not a feature placed in a room; it is the outside of the house, brought in. The same stone reappears downstairs on the lower-level fireplace, carrying the logic all the way through.

Approximately 1,100 square feet of outdoor room

Quartzite flagstone Upper Stone Patio with glass railings looking toward the Gore Range in summer
Natural stone flagstone, glass panel railings, and heavy timber posts carrying the covered portion. Beyond the rail: spruce, the drop of the valley, then the Gore Range.

Then the walls open. Large sliding glass panels retract and the living room becomes continuous with roughly 1,100 square feet of the Upper Stone Patio. Not a balcony. A second living floor, outdoors.

Not a balcony. A second living floor, outdoors.

The Upper Stone Patio is finished in natural quartzite flagstone in an irregular cut, with cool grey and warm tan tones laid so the surface reads more like natural terrain than a traditional wood deck. Glass panel railings hold the edge without interrupting a single sightline.

Sliding glass wall open from the great room onto the covered Upper Stone Patio
The sliding wall open, the Upper Stone Patio reading as an extension of the floor.

Heavy timber posts carry the covered portion, where the roof extends far enough to make the space usable in weather, which in Colorado is the difference between a patio you own and a patio you use. There is room here for a full outdoor kitchen, a dining table under cover, lounge seating in the sun, and daybeds at the open end. On an August evening with the glass stacked back, the grill going, and thirty people moving between inside and out, the house does not feel crowded. It feels correctly sized.

The primary suite

Primary bedroom with vaulted beamed ceiling and picture window framing the valley
A picture window at the foot of the bed, and a slider straight onto the Upper Stone Patio.
Primary bathroom with backlit quartz vanity and freestanding soaking tub
The backlit quartz vanity, the stone lit from within.

The primary suite sits on the main level and is treated as a retreat rather than a showpiece. The bedroom carries the same vaulted ceiling and exposed timber as the great room, with a sliding door opening directly onto the Upper Stone Patio: coffee outside, in a robe, without passing through the rest of the house.

The bath is long and luminous, and its centerpiece is a backlit quartz countertop: a slab lit from within so the stone’s veining reads as light rather than pattern. There is a walk-in glass shower and oversized his-and-her closets. A freestanding soaking tub is thoughtfully positioned so the surrounding trees and mountain vistas remain fully visible while the owner soaks and relaxes.

The detail that is memorable is not the finish schedule. It is that you can lie in the tub and watch weather move across the mountain.

The office, and why it matters

There is a dedicated office on the main level, and it deserves more than a bullet point. The realistic version of owning a mountain home is not a clean break from working life. It is arriving on a Thursday, handling what has to be handled Friday morning, and being genuinely off by noon. A proper office (with a door, on the main floor) is what converts a long weekend into a working week in the mountains. It is the feature that turns four days a year into four weeks.

The garage and the lower level

Three bays, radiant heat, high ceilings. At this elevation radiant heat is not a luxury; it is the difference between a clean floor and a slush pit from November to April. The ceiling height is the more interesting specification: genuine clearance for a Sprinter van or a full-size pickup, and enough vertical room that a lift becomes a real conversation.

The stair lands in a second full living space, not a bonus room: a lounge and media area anchored by the second stone fireplace, room for a billiards table, and a casual dining nook by the window.

Lower-level family room with second stone fireplace and billiards area
Daylight two floors down, thanks to the light well at the front of the house.

The family room opens directly onto the Lower Patio, and there is room there for a true recovery environment: a walk-in hot tub, an outdoor sauna, a cold plunge, a full outdoor kitchen, outdoor dining, and lounge furniture. It is the place to land after a long day in the mountains, whether it was spent skiing, hiking, mountain biking, golfing, or simply being outside. Guest and family bedrooms are positioned on both sides of this level, so guests get their own floor and their own hours rather than being stacked in one corridor.

And there is a substantial flex space with roughly ten-foot ceilings deliberately left to the next owner: the right volume for a gym, a screening room, a golf simulator, a game room, or a children’s floor. Ten feet of clear height is what makes all of those genuinely possible rather than theoretically possible.

The Cordillera Lifestyle

Aerial view of Cordillera Summit surrounded by protected open space, Eagle County, Colorado
Roughly 7,000 acres above Edwards, about 3,000 of them protected open space, owned and managed by the community itself.

Cordillera is roughly 7,000 acres on the hillsides above Edwards, and the number that matters more is this one: about 3,000 of those acres are protected open space, owned and managed by the Cordillera Metropolitan District and maintained expressly for scenic quality, forest health, and wildlife habitat.

That is the entire proposition. You are not buying a lot with a view of open space. You are acquiring an asset within a community defined by its protected open space.

Roughly 30 miles of private trails run through it for hiking, biking, Nordic skiing, and snowshoeing. There are stocked fishing ponds and community access to nearly a mile and a half of the Eagle River for fly fishing. The Summit neighborhood sits at the high end of the property, with a trailhead giving direct access to White River National Forest.

Access is controlled at two gatehouses, and Cordillera’s Public Safety agents work around the clock, staffing gates, patrolling roads, and responding within the community. It is a real security operation rather than a decorative gate.

The Athletic Center reopened in June 2022 after a renovation of more than $8 million, funded from Cordillera’s real estate transfer assessments with no special assessment and no long-term debt. It came back roughly 70% larger. Inside its 16,000 square feet: cardio and weight rooms, a yoga studio, an indoor saltwater pool, and a large outdoor spa, with a tennis court and five pickleball courts adjacent. Separately, the Trailhead Clubhouse offers a heated outdoor saltwater pool with lap lanes, a hot tub, a playground, and a basketball court.

Golf — the honest version

This is where marketing usually gets sloppy, so here is the accurate picture. The Club at Cordillera is a private members-only club operating three 18-hole championship courses: the Valley Course by Tom Fazio, the Mountain Course by Hale Irwin, and the Summit Course, a Jack Nicklaus signature design built across 190 mountaintop acres at roughly 9,000 feet. All three operate on staggered seasons. Troon acquired the club outright in December 2024 after managing it since 2013.

The critical point: club membership is separate from property ownership. Buying in Cordillera does not convey a golf membership, and membership is open to non-owners as well. Anyone weighing golf as part of the decision should treat it as a separate application with its own categories, dues, and (for some tiers) a waitlist. We are glad to make the introduction, but we are not going to imply the two come bundled, because they do not.

What does come with ownership is the Short Course: a nine-hole, par-27 course designed by short-game authority Dave Pelz, one of only two signature Pelz courses in the world. It is owned by the Property Owners Association and is free to Cordillera property owners.

The small things that turn out to matter

Cordillera has its own full-service United States Post Office in the community’s town center, staffed weekdays, with boxes, holds, and forwarding for property owners, genuinely useful for an owner who is away for stretches. Residents consistently rank it among the community’s best amenities, which tells you something about what daily life here actually values. There is also a community car wash, free to property owners, a small thing until you have driven Colorado roads in March.

Other amenities include the Cordillera Equestrian Center, described as the largest equestrian facility in the Vail Valley with capacity for more than 40 horses; horseback riding and winter sleigh rides; a dog park; and community gardens. For ski days there is the Cordillera Vail Gondola Club, a members’ space steps from Gondola One in Vail Village.

Your neighbors are elk

Cordillera’s open space is managed as working wildlife habitat, and the community is direct about the trade-offs that requires. Leash laws are strictly enforced. Wildlife movement corridors have been permanently set aside. Certain trail segments close every spring during calving season so elk and deer are not disturbed.

Certain trails close every spring for calving season. Your neighbors are elk, and the community is organized around admitting it.

Elk, deer, moose, bear, and mountain lion all use this ground; on the Mountain Course it is ordinary to watch elk cross a fairway. Outdoor lighting is shielded and downcast by design to protect the night sky.

Cordillera sits about 25 miles from Eagle County Regional Airport and roughly 140 miles from Denver International, with Vail, Beaver Creek, and the restaurants of Edwards a short drive away: close enough to be easy, far enough up the hill to be quiet.

It will not suit a buyer who wants to walk out the door into a village at 9 p.m. It suits someone else: the owner who spends most of the year in a city and wants somewhere to disappear for a week in February and three weeks in July. Where the objective is not activity but recovery. Long dinners. Fresh air. Trails from the driveway. Skiing forty minutes away. Children and grandchildren in the same house, on different floors. And waking up to mountains instead of noise.

That it does not suit everyone is precisely why it stays the way it is.

Why 89 Pritchel Place Is an Opportunity

Architecture. A Judge + Associates residence (site-driven design and honest structure) rather than a builder-spec interpretation of mountain modern.

Setting. A position in Cordillera’s Summit Greens/Woods with a view corridor across the valley to the Gore Range.

Indoor/outdoor living. The butterfly roof, the clerestory and floor-to-ceiling glazing, the retracting glass walls, and approximately 1,100 square feet of Upper Stone Patio combine into one continuous living environment.

Entertaining. A great room that absorbs a crowd, an Upper Stone Patio that absorbs the overflow, and a lower level that gives guests their own floor. Gathering space without the loss of privacy.

Materials. Natural stone carried from exterior to interior, quartzite flagstone paving, custom oak cabinetry, wide-plank European oak floors, structural timber, exposed steel, backlit quartz, and Pella glazing.

Community. One of the Vail Valley’s most private communities: 3,000 acres of protected open space, staffed gates, a renovated athletic center, trails from the door, and Vail and Beaver Creek within reach.

There are luxury homes, and then there are homes where the architecture, the setting, the materials, and the way you would actually live all arrive at the same answer. Recreating that combination (this architect, this ridge, this roofline, this patio, this community) would be extremely difficult, and expensive to attempt.

No photograph does this house justice. The scale of the great room, the way the light well pulls daylight two floors down, the moment the glass walls slide back and the Upper Stone Patio becomes part of the room: none of it survives a screen. It has to be walked.

See It for Yourself

Explore 89 Pritchel Place — View Photos, Property Details & Current Offering

See all 82 photographs, full specifications, and current pricing, or arrange a private showing with us, in English or Spanish. If you are still weighing neighborhoods, our up-valley or down-valley guide and the Eagle County market report are good places to start, and you can browse everything currently on the market here.


Listing Agent

Alida Zwaan, REALTOR with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Colorado Properties, Vail Lionshead office

Alida Zwaan, REALTOR®
Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Colorado Properties
Vail-Lionshead Office, 511 E. Lionshead Circle, Vail, CO 81657

Mobile: (970) 471-0291
Office: (970) 471-0291
Visit Alida Zwaan’s website

Designations and awards: REALTOR®, Chairman’s Circle Gold

MLS #1012482. Listing courtesy of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Colorado Properties (Vail Lionshead). Mountain Views Team is not the listing brokerage and is pleased to represent buyers on this property. Information is deemed reliable but is not guaranteed and should be independently verified. Square footage, finishes, community amenities, and club membership availability are subject to change. Club at Cordillera membership is separate from property ownership and is not conveyed with the purchase of this residence. Equal Housing Opportunity.

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