The mile-high state capital of Colorado has some prime, only-in-Denver wonders.
Union Station has been enticingly rejuvenated. The Tattered Cover theatre-turned-bookstore adds drama to the printed word. And west of downtown, where the Rockies begin to rumble, rises surely the world’s most scenic music venue.
The Red Rocks Amphitheatre is hewn from the raw, rusty sandstone that resembles an endless sunset. Occasionally, Stevie Nicks rocks the Red Rocks. And when the music legend is performing, Larry Mueller will be in the front row.
“Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac stays with us often,” he says. “We’re her sanctuary. When she needs a break, she comes to the Cuvée world.”
Mr Mueller is CEO of Cuvée, the global travel industry’s most upmarket travel enterprise.
The Cuvée world is a planet located about as far from the everyday accommodation experience as it is possible to be. The core business of Cuvée is long established in the travel industry: an intermediary between property owners and guests.
But the properties are exceptionals – as are the bank balances of the guests. The mission of the business, which he founded along with Susan Farrugia in 2006, is to provide “the world’s best collection of luxury private villas and immersive cultural experiences”.
Cuvée, headquartered in Denver, has 140 properties on its books with a total value of $4bn (to save you the maths, that makes the average home worth around £20m). The highest concentration is in the Colorado Rockies, but the network reaches to Cape Cod, Hawaii, the Caribbean, Mexico, Italy and beyond.
Some are owned by the business itself, but most belong to high net worth individuals who have a property portfolio. Perhaps the essence of Cuvée’s supply side can be summed up by another vintage rock star: Joe Walsh. In “Life’s Been Good”, he sings: “I have a mansion, forget the price / Ain’t never been there, they tell me it’s nice.”
“Nice” hardly begins to describe the properties I visited in and around Vail and Aspen. While some Cuvée options are tucked into the downtown grid, the typical Cuvée dwelling is located far from the madding crowd on what you could call Billionaires’ Ridge: high on a hillside, wrapped in woodland that opens up to provide spectacular views – including from the outdoor jacuzzi. The abundant wildlife includes the occasional American black bear wandering past the verandah.
The interior has an open-plan living area, framed by trestles and with the kind of kitchen that would impress the most fastidious celebrity chef. Bedrooms-aplenty are furnished with an abundance of good taste – and to meet Cuvée’s detailed specifications.
“We established a set of standards that we wanted Cuvée to have in every home,” says Mueller. “Now there’s some owners that we don’t have to do it for. They have outstanding taste and they meet our standards.
“For many of our owners, the home wasn’t at that standard. So Cuvée had to develop and implement its own construction company and its own interior design company.
“We’re really invested in ensuring the home meets those standards – all the way from what type of glassware is in the cupboards, to the thread count of the sheets that you’re sleeping in, to the finishes that you see in the home itself.”
Could Cuvée be concisely summed up as ultra-posh Airbnb? No, says Larry Mueller. “Their average nightly rental rate of their homes is under $200 (£150) a night. Cuvée’s average nightly rental rate is over $10,000 (£7,500) a night but goes up as high as $40,000 (£30,000) to $50,000 (£37,000) a night.”
At the top end, that corresponds to a week’s accommodation costing a cool quarter-million pounds. That is about 1,000 times as much as a self-catering apartment in Benidorm. At such a stratospheric level, says Mueller, Cuvée faces no competition.
“The only competitor we have is ourselves. It’s our ability to continue to strive for the standards that we established. As long as we continue to do that, there’s no one in our league.”
The essential complement to a high and mighty property are experiences to go with it. For a man who built his early career in the tech sector, Mueller is long on emotion. While running IBM’s European operation with 100,000 employees from Paris, he “fell in love with the diversity and the different cultures of Europe” while travelling around his domain.
“I love the architecture. I love the different cuisines. I love their focus on their language. So I thought: why don’t we define something where we could offer the very upscale places in the world but combine it with highly curated experiences so that people could really learn the culture?”
Ultra luxury is designed in; experiences are bespoke. In Italy, for example, guests at a Tuscan farmhouse can opt for expert-led winetasting and pasta-making, a dedicated guided walking tour of Siena. They can explore the hills of Tuscany in an original Fiat 500, or soar above the landscape in a helicopter – all arranged by “experience curators”.
Larry Mueller and I met in the penthouse of the Ritz-Carlton in Bachelor Gulch, Colorado. The top floor of the five-star hotel happens to be a Cuvée property, with its own special access lift.
“One of my favourite activities [here] outside of skiing is to go in the backwoods in a sleigh ride.
“We developed an experience where we had Clydesdale horses pull the sleigh in the backwoods.
“There’s nothing more beautiful than being in the winter in the mountains where it’s so still and silent. These Clydesdales are pulling you through the woods and you hear their breathing, and they just want to do their job right.
“Then we end up at a cabin in the woods where we do a beautiful gourmet dinner.”
“Those are the type of experiences that we create in all of our destinations in order to bring the culture alive.”
Every business needs supply and demand. On the supply side, any property owners would love to be part of the Cuvée portfolio. But few are chosen. “At the end of the day we only take probably one out of every 30 homeowners that come to us.”
What, though, is in it for the owners? It is a fair bet that many of the ultra-high net worth individuals who own these properties could cope without Cuvée rental flowing in for their private palaces.
“Some families that we work with are in the top five wealthiest families in the world. And the question is: why would they want to share that because it’s not money at that point, right?
“I find it really intriguing. Even for myself at a dramatically lower level, I love sharing my properties that I own with people that either are friends and family or people that rent it from me.
“I love to have them experience the joy of what we offer and that brings joy to me. But it also brings the ability to monetise the property and continue to improve the property.” Those properties, he says, are like people.
“They need to live. They need to be used and they need to breathe. Property that sits vacant on mountains or on oceans deteriorates – just like we would, right, as human beings? If we didn’t get off the sofa we would deteriorate. We need to be out there hiking up that mountain and then enjoying the time with the people we love in this environment.”
How do guests find Cuvée? “In the early days of Cuvée we didn’t do any marketing, because they came to us. That’s a nice situation to have, but as we’ve grown we’ve had to reach out.
“People will search for ‘luxury ski in ski out in Aspen’. We own that term and we will come up and people will send us an enquiry. You wouldn’t think that someone that’s going to pay $20,000 (£15,000) a night would be out there searching on Google, but that’s the world we live in and that world is expanding.”
Social media is also critical. In the US, the former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning is akin to David Beckham’s celebrity in the UK. Manning, with almost one million followers on Instagram, is a Cuvée regular.
“He is a great advocate. Peyton wrote us a note after he went to our private island. He’s one of the biggest stars in the world. He went with his dad, who also played football, and his brother Eli plays football and all their grandkids and it was his mom’s birthday and just wrote a notice that this was one of the most unique times in their whole family’s history.
“That’s the joy that I get out of it. Really, we’re creating the most beautiful times in people’s lives.”
“What a Peyton Manning wants versus what a Stevie Nicks wants is completely different. Yet you need to deliver it at those levels, and that’s what Cuvée does.”
Having created Cuvée, and personally owning some outstanding properties, Larry Mueller could take one endless vacation. But he chooses to work ferociously hard.
“My life has been elevated dramatically because of Cuvée and that is really a beautiful thing. So I always tell my team that right now I don’t believe I work a day in my life. How many people can say that?”
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