Private clubs are “everywhere right now,” according to GQ. They’re “hot,” per the outlet Entrepreneur, “booming,” according to the luxury-focused Robb Report. “Members-only mania,” The New York Times declared in the spring of 2024. People want to feel like they belong, they want a “third place” to hang outside of home and work, they want connection and intimacy and privacy and maybe cachet and they’re willing to pay for it — from a couple hundred bucks a month up to six-figure initiation fees and thousands in annual dues. Businesses are cashing in.
So of course, Aspen is part of the trend. This summer marked the quiet debut of Am7, an entertainment, dining and social club two floors above the Belly Up concert venue. Chalet Alpina, the development formerly known as Lift One Lodge, has just begun infrastructure work but is already touting a private club that will offer a “curated mountain lifestyle” with access to “multiple private venues” in addition to its luxury condos and commercial space, according to an email from a PR representative.
Further afield, the Kodiak Club is under construction at the Tree Farm in El Jebel, with both condos and a private social and dining club for a “discerning” clientele, according to its website. The club is promising a restaurant and bar, cultural events and outdoor excursions, as well as onsite guest suites and reciprocal privileges at clubs in other cities.
And in downtown Carbondale, Marble Distilling has converted its public bar into the membership-based “Club Marble,” which opened in early September with a robust calendar of events like trivia nights, cocktail classes and guest speakers. Memberships are $1,500 per year for one person, with different rates for young professionals, six-month seasonal members, businesses and other tiers. A $50 day pass includes a couple cocktails.
Proprietor Connie Baker said it was partly a financial decision and partly an effort to provide the quality service and cultural events that customers say they enjoy. Memberships are to clubs what season passes are to ski areas: an upfront influx of cash that can cover expenses and a certain level of service regardless of whether anyone shows up on a given night, as well as some assurance that at least someone will show up because they’ve already committed to be there.
“We know people want to go out and have fun … but I think they want a better experience,” Baker said. “And so, if you start to see these [clubs] pop up, it’s because people ask for them.”
‘Primal, dressed up as luxury’
All this is in addition to Aspen’s mainstays and other institutions throughout the Roaring Fork Valley.
Foremost, for many, is the Caribou Club, with its plaid carpets, antler chandeliers and Earl Biss mural on the wall. The club’s restaurant, bar and famously lively dance floor have occupied the same subterranean space on East Hopkins Avenue since the club opened in 1990. An annual membership for two — $4,000 for the first year and $3,000 after that — gets you through the wooden door marked “PRIVATE” and into the mood-lit scene downstairs.
The Aspen Mountain Club, another behemoth, arrived a decade later with a private bar and restaurant inside the Sundeck atop Aspen Mountain and ski lockers down at the base. Modern art, chocolate leather chairs and bright red motifs decorate this spot notorious for its exclusivity: Local Magazine reported the initiation fee was up to $275,000 in 2023, with $7,400 in annual dues that include lift access to the slopes. (A spokeswoman for the club’s parent company Aspen One declined to confirm previously reported numbers or provide current membership rates for this story, writing in an email that the company does not share that information publicly.)
Back downtown, Casa Tua has offered a members-only space above its public Italian restaurant at the corner of South Galena Street and East Cooper Avenue since its inception in 2010, decorating the second floor of the chalet-style building like an alpine living room with antler mounts, tree trunks and rotating art displays. The Aspen concept was Casa Tua’s second location, following a model its owners first launched in Miami Beach; additional outposts are now open in Paris and New York City. Initiation fees currently range from $700 to $3,400, depending on the membership tier, with annual dues of $2,500 to $11,500, according to their membership application page.
“There is so much value in feeling like you belong,” said Michaela Carpenter, who is closely attuned to the private club landscape in Aspen. She previously operated the private Here House coworking and social space and the adjacent public Local Coffee House in downtown Aspen with her mother, Candice Carpenter-Olson for several years, and did a brief stint at the Aspen outpost of Gravity Haus this spring.
When it comes to private clubs, “this feeling of belonging is primal, dressed up as luxury,” she said.
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Note:
Social clubs are built around their dining, bar and entertainment options, sometimes with extra perks like a spa, gym or coworking space. Country clubs, which also offer dining and entertainment, promise amenitites like golf, tennis, swimming pools and fitness centers as well. Fraternal organizations are largely focused on philanthropic endeavors and community service; they may also serve food and drink.
All of the organizations on this map offer a clubhouse or other space, like a lodge, for members to gather. Some are connected to a condo or neighborhood development, but residency is not a requirement of membership.This map does not include gyms, yoga studios or sport-specific clubs (such as the Aspen Yacht Club, Aspen Valley Ski and Snowboard Club or Smuggler Racquet Club), nor does it include public golf courses with clubhouses. It also does not include private residential developments, such as the Ritz Carlton Club, where the gathering space is exclusively reserved for condo or homeonwers.
Outside the commercial core, and well past the roundabout, developments following more of a country club model have situated their clubhouses among golf courses, tennis courts and other swanky amenities. Residence clubs, which combine members-only spaces with the development of condos or houses, experienced their own veritable “boom” here in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Yet some clubs have already come and gone in the latest surge.
Gravity Haus, the outdoorsy brand of hotels and membership clubs with locations in a number of mountain towns, shuttered its downtown “AspenHaus” along with the public Unravel Coffee and Boat Tow restaurant at the end of August.
The cafe had been open since late 2022 and the restaurant (initially called “Le Bateau”) since the summer of 2023. The clubhouse, with fitness amenities, ski lockers, a bar, and coworking space had been up and running less than a year. Membership was $400 per month, which included perks like access to gear rentals, community programming and complimentary hotel nights at other Gravity Haus properties, according to an email from a PR representative for Gravity Haus. The Aspen location “could accommodate about 800 memberships,” but actual numbers fluctuated with the seasons, “from a few hundred members during quieter times up to several hundred in peak periods.”
Gravity Haus had come to Aspen in part because “we had an amazing opportunity to rent a premier address in one of the world’s most incredible places,” the email stated. “Financial highs from the post-COVID travel boom at many of our other locations” also helped.
“However, rising costs of construction, lack of trade labor in the market, and several unexpected issues with the building caused us to be behind schedule and well over budget in our anticipated investment costs, eating into our working capital,” according to the email. The PR representative also noted Aspen was the only Gravity Haus location without a hotel as part of its business model. “While we are proud of what we built — and the community we engaged — ultimately, the high cost of doing business in Aspen proved to be too much of a drain on our investment strategy and our existing resources.”
According to the representative, “Gravity Haus will instead continue to invest in outdoor adventure destinations where more immediate value can be realized.” The company opened its first Montana location in Big Sky this summer, as well as a new outpost in Denver.
As Peter Cole, the cofounder and CEO of the members club consulting firm Collectio Group told the Robb Report in 2024: “In the next three to four years, you’re going to see two things happen simultaneously: One is that clubs will continue to proliferate, but at the same time, a number of them will go out of business.”
But, as another club-world executive said in the same story: “’We do make money. If you can make membership clubs work, they’re a very lucrative model.”
“Indeed,” Robb Report editor-at-large Mark Ellwood wrote, “experts say the appealing financials of successful social clubs are key to their current renaissance.”
‘A difficult thing to regulate’
As of last year, the city of Aspen was fielding upward of half a dozen queries a year from people with new members-only ideas, according to an email from community development director Ben Anderson, though the often-informal conversations “tend not to go very far.”
Still, it was enough to prompt a discussion with city council in December 2024, as the land use code defines various commercial uses as establishments that provide goods or services “to the general public,” but the code does not specify how that should be enforced for private clubs.
City staff interpret the language to mean existing clubs cannot expand and new clubs should offer a day pass, but that isn’t a formal requirement. City staff have “discouraged” some proposals and “encouraged more inclusive models,” Anderson wrote in an email, but they have not taken any recent enforcement action against venues that don’t offer a day pass.
At the time, Councilman John Doyle suggested that these clubs can function as “walls that separate us as citizens,” running counter to Aspen’s onetime reputation as a place where the billionaires rub elbows with the ski bums. But exclusivity and inclusivity are a “difficult thing to regulate,” Anderson said at the meeting. Councilman Sam Rose noted during the work session that clubs are not “one size fits all,” that a policy regulating public access would be hard to apply across vastly different organizations, and that a day pass requirement could look like “virtue signaling” if there weren’t rules around the price of those passes as well. And while “it’s not great to be excluded from the things that you want to do,” Rose said, “that’s kind of just the world we live in.”
Multiple councilors said they supported community development staff looking into an update to the land use code for more specificity around private clubs. In several neighboring municipalities, land use codes don’t have specific public-access provisions for private clubs, but in some cases, the review and approval of a residence or country club development has come with a stipulation for community benefits. (A few high-end country clubs have been subjected to local play provisions on their golf courses, each based on unique agreements with their respective municipalities. In the winter, easements allow Aspen Snowmass Nordic to groom free, public ski trails on some of the snow-covered links.)
Since that conversation last year, “the topic seems to have slowed down,” Anderson wrote in an email, and the “status quo” of some “generally applicable language” about public access remains. “With all of the other priorities that are asked of ComDev at this time, a code change is not currently proposed.”
Club spaces can get “demonized,” according to Carpenter, because of their very nature: The same thing that gives one person a sense of belonging points out to another that they don’t belong. She believes it’s possible for private clubs to be inclusive of different economic strata — and promoted as much when Here House debuted in 2019, in a space adjacent to the design store-turned-cafe she and her mother already ran next door. The club offered tiered pricing for its memberships, with higher-priced options that offered more amenities essentially “subsidizing” the options that had a more affordable point of entry. There were also day passes available, and a swath of events were open to the public.
Carpenter said it took an education campaign to get local officials on board with the concept at the time; some of them later became members themselves.
In Aspen, “there’s a value system that really celebrates that financial diversity and values those differences, and values a community that can support both a local and tourist economy,” Carpenter said. It’s idealistic, maybe, “because it’s obviously, economically, really challenging to achieve that, but I would say that’s most closely tied to our roots as a town, and the Aspen Idea.”
“And then I would say there is an imported value system that values beauty, luxury and high end amenities, and [people] are willing to pay for them,” Carpenter said.
Here House was open for about five years before it closed in February 2024. Carpenter said it was profitable but the timing and price were right to sell the lease to Aspen restaurateur Raphael Derly; it’s now the French-Indonesian restaurant Wayan. This spring, she joined the Gravity Haus Aspen team as club director and made several suggestions for their operations and pricing, including a proposal to introduce the tiered model that had worked at Here House. She left after about two months when it became clear those ideas would not be implemented.
For all that Carpenter believes a club can or should do to welcome the breadth of the community — “to have texture, you have to have variance” — she doesn’t think the city should be the one regulating whether these spaces are private or public. “My general rule of thumb is that the city should be involved in as little decision making as possible … when it comes to businesses,” Carpenter said.
Besides, she sees these spaces as a “beautiful model” for belonging: “When it’s done well, it can be really full and nourishing for people’s lives.”
“There’s a ton of articles about how clubs are taking over New York, for example. I wouldn’t say clubs are taking over Aspen,” Carpenter said. “You know, I think we’re right on trend [with] how the world is moving. But it doesn’t intimidate me, and it doesn’t make me sad for Aspen. I think it’s just sort of a way of our modern time.”
What’s a club, anyway?
We’re mostly talking about private social clubs here, where connection and belonging are some of the biggest selling points and the club has a permanent physical location for members to hang out. “Residence clubs,” which develop private social spaces and other amenities in tandem with condos or houses, would count as a private social club so long as they also offer a nonresident membership option. Country clubs are part of this scene, too.
While these clubs may offer food and drink, events, athletic facilities or space to get some work done, they are distinct from restaurants, entertainment venues, gyms and co-working-specific spaces. Social clubs often frame these services as amenities or perks, rather than the primary business model.
Still, some membership-based athletic clubs and fitness studios can become de facto social clubs and embrace the label themselves. Exhibit A: Jayne Gottlieb, the owner of the Aspen Shakti yoga studio, is currently developing a plan for more of a club model, in which members will get additional opportunities to connect alongside discounted rates on classes.
‘A very high standard’
In many cases, admission to these clubs is contingent not only on ability to pay but also on a member’s values, character and connections. Most clubs require endorsements or invitations from other members to join, though some vet applicants more rigorously than others and some offer more clues to the selection criteria.
The new Am7 — a joint venture between Michael, David and Danny Goldberg of the Belly Up and Charles Attal of festival producing powerhouse C3 Presents — touts a music-loving philosophy and “scrupulously” selected membership that is “intentionally diverse and eclectic,” according to its website.
Most applicants must answer screening questions like “What is your favorite song lyric?” and “What is your ideal night with friends and family?” There is a separate application for local service industry membership, which offers club access with blackout dates and without some of the other tiers’ perks (which include, at different levels, access to a club “concierge,” the ability to nominate new members and the ability to send unaccompanied guests).
Those service-industry applicants must share their favorite annual event or festival in town and how they are involved with the local community, among other questions, and must provide a reference to confirm their local employment. Pricing is not listed online, and the club’s ownership did not respond to requests for comment. (They appear to have eschewed any publicity for the new venture since its opening).
Over at the Caribou Club, prospective members must meet a “a very high standard” to get in, said Billy Stolz, who has been with the club since the beginning. But in this town, “I think 99.5% of people are qualified as far as affordability and sophistication and knowing other people.”
An annual club membership for two is $4,000 for the first year and $3,000 after that, with temporary memberships offered to those who want just a week or two of access. But there is also a special rate for locals ($3,000 for the first year and $2,000 thereafter, plus a $500 quarterly minimum spend requirement unique to that membership tier). The club offers a flat $250 annual membership for some worker bees like teachers, firefighters, Mountain Rescue volunteers and “anyone of that ilk,” Stolz wrote in an email.
And then there are Aspen’s two egalitarian fraternal organizations, the Elks and the Eagles, both around for more than a century with an emphasis on volunteerism and community service. (Recipients of their benevolence range from veterans and senior citizens to graduating high schoolers and junior footballers.)
Endorsement from current members is required for admission to either association, as is a commitment and willingness to serve the community. It’s $50 a year to be a member of the Eagles Club, formally called an “Aerie,” located on East Bleeker Street near Rio Grande Park, according to club secretary Chris Lundgren.
Annual dues at the Aspen Elks Lodge downtown are $47 for a “lifetime member” and $110 for a regular member, according to the organization’s website. Just don’t call their location on East Hyman Avenue a “club”: For the Elks, it is always — always — a lodge.
The ‘Cheers’ effect
The Eagles Club is a “locals’ hangout,” and an admittedly “blue collar” one at that, Lundgren said. He was drawn to the club in part by a chance “to escape the tourists” and in part by the charitable nature of the group. The closure of other longstanding watering holes like the Red Onion and Little Annie’s may be one reason that the Eagles have seen a growth in membership in recent years, Lundgren said.
“It’s one of the few places in town that you’re going to go in, and you’re going to know everybody, regardless of the season,” Lundgren said.
The sense of familiarity is a selling point for higher-end spaces too: May Selby, a member of the Elks, the Smuggler Racquet Club and the Caribou Club, described the ‘Bou as something like a scene out of “Cheers,” where “it really feels like you’re part of a social fabric here that has so much history and heritage and hospitality,” with staff who “know exactly what you want when you walk in there” and customers from “all walks of life.”
But the clientele at swankier clubs may be trying to get away from the masses just as well.
“When I moved here, even in the early 2000s, there was definitely that vibe of the tourists wanting to be a part of the local community,” Lundgren said. “But I feel like, honestly, that there’s a little bit of a reversal there, where the tourists want more exclusivity, and they want to be able to have their high end-drinks away from the locals and the service industry people that are taking care of them.”
The same might be said of some luxury clubs’ full-time Aspenite members, too. Consider the ethos on the Aspen Mountain Club website, promising a “social refuge for Aspen’s network of thought leaders and tastemakers” and a redesign that offers both “a feeling of home and an escape from the town’s seasonal buzz.”
This isn’t exactly a new philosophy. The notion of an “escape” — and tensions surrounding the social stratification of private clubs — have existed since Aspen’s mining days.
‘A people of refinement’
Newspaper archives recount a host of 19th-century predecessors to the modern club boom, including a Roaring Fork Club described as “one of Aspen’s first associations of culture.” (No relation to the present-day country club and golf course in Basalt.)
In 1888, it welcomed none other than Jerome B. Wheeler, in “a reception to show this merchant prince that all did not lie in New York, but beside grand natural resources and unparalleled scenery we possessed a people of refinement,” the Rocky Mountain Sun reported.
Another venture, the Aspen Club, opened in 1895 in a house downtown, promising both public spaces and private rooms in which “gentlemen … can sit down with a friend and not be molested or annoyed by the public,” according to the Aspen Morning Sun. The goods available would be ‘the very best that money can buy.” (Again, no apparent relation to the modern-day fitness club east of town that has been closed and in construction limbo for years as a redevelopment project stalled.)
Archives show less activity in the way of members-only spaces during Aspen’s “Quiet Years,” a period of several decades that followed the devaluation of silver in 1893, though the Elks Lodge (founded in 1891) and the Eagles Club (since 1901) endured.
But with Aspen’s modern renaissance, pioneered by Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke in the late 1940s, there was another resurgence. For all the talk about a different Aspen of the past, even Walter Paepcke himself once owned a private club here — the Four Seasons, two miles outside of town on the banks of Castle Creek.
In the club’s heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, the society pages of local newspapers described a friendly and intimate atmosphere at the Four Seasons, which also hosted some public events. The actor Gary Cooper went there, according to photos from the era. So did Friedl Pfeifer and Herbert Bayer.
The place also “riled locals,” and “insulted them,” as Paepcke sought “exclusive fishing rights” for the club on Castle Creek, according to writer Hal Rothman in the book “Devil’s Bargains.”
“To many locals accustomed to a different concept of community, it seemed that Paepcke truly sought a kingdom of his own in their mountains,” Rothman wrote. James Sloan Allen, in “The Romance of Commerce and Culture,” described it as an “elegant failure, constantly in the red and passing through numerous changes of management while Paepcke continually tried to sell it.” By the ‘60s, it would be repurposed for other pursuits: a campus for the Aspen Music Festival and School and later, the Aspen Country Day School, as well.
That didn’t stop others from toying with the idea of a club themselves. In 1965, decades before the Aspen Mountain Club was even a fledgling idea, the Aspen Illustrated News reported on proposals for a development atop Ajax that would “provide one of the plushiest private clubs in any ski area,” a place for members to “escape the crowds and enjoy themselves” with a $1,000 lifetime membership (more than $10,000 in 2025 dollars). It appears the place never came to fruition, though; Wine Tree Inn, Inc. was declared “defunct and inoperative” by the Colorado Secretary of State in 1968.
Then, in 1976, select Aspenites got invitations to join “El Privado” at the Aspen Inn (located where the St. Regis is now), with a $1,000 gold membership and another that had a $250 initiation fee and $50 a month charge. The so-called “apres ski parlor and entertainment snuggery” was reportedly designed by set builders from MGM and Universal and claimed board members like Diana Ross and Dionne Warwick, according to a January 1977 news brief in the Aspen Times. (It appears the club didn’t last long, though: It was included in the 1977 phone book but not the directories of subsequent years.)
Some Aspenites fed up with the scene lamented the changes afoot in their community through newspaper columns and letters to the editor. But others found humor in the situation. Ballet West, for a fundraiser event in 1979, advertised the grand opening of “Chisholm’s Saloon Private Club,” which would offer “free use of upstairs, special pigeon hole for your tobacco, 100% plastic food, absolutely no phone calls, … no amenities whatsoever, [and] free coat check.”
Membership (that is, admittance to the event) would be $1.30 for a single and $2.45 for a couple — but “anyone attired in suits, ties, sports jackets, coordinated Levi ensembles, furs, gold chains, silk pants, exposed navels or anything else management feels inappropriate will be charged an entrance fee of $50.00 per couple,” an advertisement read. One attendee declared it “the best private club in Aspen.”
Andre’s, a discotheque located in the building that once housed the Eagles Club and is now a Prada storefront downtown, had a brief stint offering a members-only space in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, though it didn’t ultimately last. An Aspen Daily News series on the “business in turmoil” in 1986 cited the “exclusivity” of that time as a hindrance, not a boon.
And then came the Caribou Club — now the longest-standing of any of Aspen’s modern private social clubs, haunt of Aspen’s high society and on Halloween, its hoi polloi too. (Anyone is allowed in on Oct. 31 so long as they are in costume.)
When it was first announced in 1989, an idea from Aspen’s preeminent luxury commercial developer Harley Baldwin, it did not blow over well.
“There [were] a lot of people opposed to it,” said Stolz, who does not claim an official title but is a familiar face to club members and is listed as the registered agent for Caribou Club Ltd. in documents filed with the Colorado Secretary of State.
“People would shout things — invectives — at us, like, ‘you’re never going to last,’ ‘you’re going to close within a year,’” Stolz recalled. In a punchy response to the arrival of the Caribou Club, future Aspen mayor John Bennett even founded the “Oubirac Club,” which cost nothing to join and offered little other than a 10% discount at his restaurant Pour La France. The Aspen Times reported that Bennett “wanted to poke fun at Aspen’s growing love affair with conspicuous consumption and the increasing legions of look-how-rich-I-am visitors coming to the valley.” The name of the club was just “caribou,” spelled backwards.
Baldwin commented on the environment in a story by Aspen Times back in 1989: “Trying to open a private club in the historically egalitarian atmosphere of Aspen ‘is certainly a double-edged sword,’ Baldwin said.”
The paper noted that “other properties have tried high-end private dining clubs, including Andre’s and the Snowmass Club,” both of which had moved to a public model when the Caribou Club was announced. “But Baldwin thinks the time is ripe for his endeavor,” the paper reported.
History would prove him right — and yield several other private clubs in subsequent years.
Downtown was met with “four two six,” owned by Eric Casper of Eric’s and Su Casa fame, in 1998 — part of “the growing ranks of members-only social clubs in Aspen,” the Aspen Daily News reported at the time. The Aspen Mountain Club, far pricier than the Caribou Club, opened atop Ajax in 2000 under the purview of the Aspen Skiing Co. One club, in 2004, was so private its owner would not even announce a name for the venue, though it did promise dancing and potentially hot tubs “for Aspen’s elite residents and clientele” on South Galena Street in the former location of the Roaring Fork Tavern dive bar, according to the Aspen Daily News.
The Roaring Fork Club, known for its golf course and other country club amenities in Basalt, also took a stab at the slopeside social scene with the Roaring Fork Mountain Club in Snowmass Village, operating in what was then the Silvertree Hotel complex from 2006 to 2012.
Casa Tua arrived in 2010, with a public restaurant on the ground floor and a members-only dining room upstairs. (Its owners debuted that model about a decade earlier, at the first Casa Tua in Miami Beach.)
The Snowmass Mountain Club joined the fold as a family-focused counterpart to the Aspen Mountain Club in 2018. Both of those ventures are now under the “Aspen Hospitality” banner, a separate division from SkiCo under the Aspen One umbrella.
And somewhere along the line, the Caribou Club didn’t seem so much like the enemy anymore.
The business’s perception has “totally changed, it’s totally turned around. Now, we’re an institution,” Stolz said. And “people find it reassuring” that staff hang around.
Selby, the Caribou Club member who appreciates its nostalgia and familiarity, agrees. She said the luxury world of which these clubs are a part “was probably coming anyway.”
“Harley Baldwin seeing that opportunity and really encouraging it — he was wise to know that would be the guest we would ultimately have,” Selby said.
Or, as Baldwin put it to Vanity Fair’s Mark Seal, for a feature in 2003: “Aspen is for the most successful people in the world. It so happens that they like to wear Gucci. Where’s the problem?”