A hotel in the shadow of a national park blends in.

“Usually, you’re curtailed to a pretty small postage stamp site for an outdoor space at a hotel like this. We’re saying, no, let’s push this program out and around and depart from the typical ‘you are in the pool [or] you are not in the pool.’ Here, we want to say, you’re always in that space, in that pool; whether you’re going to the campfire or you’re going on a hike, that space is contiguous.”

—Todd Briggs, ASLA

When they got the call about a new hotel in development near Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, the designers at TRUEFORM landscape architecture studio hopped in their car and drove from Arizona to camp on the site. Despite hosting five national parks, the region has few population centers and scant lodging to support Bryce’s increasing visitation (2.4 million visitors last year), much less the thousands of mountain bikers drawn to the area’s trails. The client, who owned the ranchland where the hotel will be sited, wanted to get away from the fenced, cookie-cutter landscapes they’d seen at other hotels. TRUEFORM deconstructed that format, extending and integrating the hotel’s landscape to take advantage of the trail network and viewsheds. Here, the team works through a few ideas.