{"id":162304,"date":"2025-09-17T03:45:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-17T03:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/162304\/"},"modified":"2025-09-17T03:45:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-17T03:45:13","slug":"revisiting-robert-redfords-western-retreat-in-sundance-utah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/162304\/","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting Robert Redford\u2019s Western Retreat in Sundance, Utah"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Redford, the actor, Oscar-winning director, and environmentalist who forever changed the independent filmmaking scene with his Sundance Film Festival, has died at the age of 89. The Hollywood icon<\/a>, who was born on August 18, 1936, died in his home on Tuesday morning, \u201cat Sundance in the mountains of Utah\u2014the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,\u201d his publicist said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Born Charles Robert Redford Jr., the actor appeared in over 50 films, beginning with a small role in 1960\u2019s Tall Story\u2014a film adaptation of the play that had served as his Broadway debut the year before. The romantic comedy starred Jane Fonda, also in her film debut. Fonda and Redford would go on to appear in four more movies together throughout their careers. \u201cIt hit me hard this morning when I read that Bob was gone,\u201d Fonda wrote in a statement. \u201cHe meant a lot to me and was a beautiful person in every way. He stood for an America we have to keep fighting for.\u201d<\/p>\n

Redford resided in Utah. In 1958, he married Utah native Lola Van Wagenen. The pair welcomed four children before divorcing in 1985, the same year he starred alongside Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. The actor remarried German artist Sibylle Szaggars in 2009. He is survived by Szaggers, his daughters Shauna Schlosser Redford and Amy Redford, and seven grandchildren.<\/p>\n

The California native\u2019s breakthrough film role came in 1969, when he was cast alongside Paul Newman<\/a> in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid\u2014though Redford\u2019s good looks almost cost him the role. \u201cHe\u2019s just another Hollywood blond. Throw a stick out of a window in Malibu, you\u2019ll hit six like him,\u201d a studio executive reportedly<\/a> said. But Newman insisted that Redford be cast as the Kid to his Butch, forming the foundation of a friendship that continued until Newman\u2019s death in 2008. \u201cWe\u2019d play tricks on each other,\u201d Redford said of their dynamic. \u201cThe more sophisticated the joke the better.\u201d The pair appeared on screen together again in The Sting in 1973, for which Redford received the only Oscar nomination of his acting career; he would later win an Oscar as a first-time director in 1980 for Ordinary People, as well as an honorary Oscar in 2002.<\/p>\n

Starting in 1961, Redford began assembling the land that would become the Sundance Mountain Resort, where the Sundance Institute was formed in 1981, and the organization\u2019s Sundance Film Festival\u2014which bolstered the careers of Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky, Ryan Coogler, and Ava Duvernay\u2014was born. As he stacked his resume with roles, Redford continued to expand his property. By the time he sold the resort<\/a> in 2020, it spanned 2,800 sprawling acres.<\/p>\n

The A River Runs Through It director was known as an avid advocate for the environment, and served as a trustee of the National Resources Defense Council non-profit for 30 years. In the 1970s, he was elected commissioner of the Provo Canyon sewer district in his beloved Utah. But according to the New York Times<\/a>, the bureaucracy involved with that experience caused the actor to become disillusioned with politics; switching gears, he opted to use independent activism and filmmaking to effect change. Among those efforts is the Redford Center, a nonprofit focused on producing environmental films. \u201cI was born with a hard eye,\u201d he told The Hollywood Reporter<\/a> in 2014. \u201cThe way I saw things, I would see what was wrong. I could see what could be better. I developed kind of a dark view of life, looking at my own country. When I was a kid, I was told to be a good sport. It wasn\u2019t whether you won or lost; it was how you played the game. I realized that was a lie.\u201d In 2016, Redford was awarded<\/a> the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his \u201clifelong advocacy on behalf of preserving our environment\u201d and \u201chis pioneering support for independent filmmakers across America.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1989, the All the President\u2019s Men star invited Architectural Digest to his cherished Utah residence, which was built with an emphasis on the surrounding natural landscape. Below, we revisit AD\u2019s tour of the legend\u2019s forever home in Sundance, where he lived and died. \u2014 Katie Schultz<\/a><\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in the April 1989 issue of Architectural Digest.<\/p>\n

In 1900 the \u201chistoric\u201d period in Native American art\u2014the period of the great 19th-century blanket weavers, headers, and potters\u2014unofficially came to a close. In 1900, also, the federal government sold a canyon\u2014a glacial bowl at the foot of Mount Timpanogos, Utah\u2014to a Mormon family named Stewart. The Stewarts purchased 3,500 acres at two and a half dollars per acre, pastured some sheep there and eventually built a small ski station with one lift and a Samoan-style restaurant. Before Utah was settled, though, the canyon had been an Indian hunting and fishing ground.<\/p>\n

Robert Redford loved that \u201csemi-wilderness\u201d long before he owned any part of it. He had passed through the canyon on his way home to Los Angeles from Colorado, where he went to college, and he found himself going back to camp there. \u201cI\u2019ve always had a visceral sense of place,\u201d he says. \u201cI know instinctively where I feel at home and where I don\u2019t, but I can\u2019t say why. The affinity isn\u2019t only too mysterious and personal, it\u2019s also the sort of thing that risks sounding hokey.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\u201cSundance<\/p>\n

\u201cSundance is a mixture of old and now, lush and spare, sophisticated and primitive\u2014like art itself,” says Robert Redford, who over the last 20 years has gradually developed the Utah ski resort and created a community dedicated to the arts. The Sundance Institute screening room, designed by San Francisco architects Backen, Arrigoni & Ross, epitomizes the spirit that Redford wanted to capture. \u201cYou enter a Hansel and Gretel cottage and find yourself in a state-of-the-art theater,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

That wariness, which is part self-irony, is typical of Redford. It protects a depth of feeling, though, that is somewhat reminiscent of another landowner and romantic hero\u2014Tolstoy\u2019s Konstantin Levin. Levin fretted over his estates with a similar reverence, fervor, pragmatism, and aloofness, and he felt something of Redford’s conviction that, in relation to the land, he is a \u201ccaretaker rather than a possessor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The rustic hillside cottages were designed by Salt Lake City architect John Shirley, who followed Redford\u2019s mandate to minimize their visual impact and to preserve the existing vegetation.<\/p>\n

After college, Redford spent less time in the West. He studied painting in Florence, a city he loves, and eventually moved to New York, another city he loves, to act on Broadway. \u201cI like extremes,\u201d he admits. \u201cThe very primitive and the very sophisticated.\u201d But his marriage to the Provo-born Lola Van Wagenen cemented the Utah connection, and in 1961 the couple acquired their first, very modest piece of local real estate\u2014two acres. The view from the homesite was then, and still is, of a pristine landscape that resembles an upturned palm: alpine meadows form its fleshy mounds and outcroppings of glacial rock are its half-clenched fingers. Its grandeur, Redford has remarked, rivals that of Africa, while its seasonal mood changes give it, if anything, more variety.<\/p>\n

\"Housed<\/p>\n

Housed in an antique case are potsherds and arrowheads. One of the prehistoric tools in front was discovered while the house\u2019s foundations were being dug.<\/p>\n

During the early sixties, Redford\u2019s career was quietly gathering momentum. \u201cDo another TV show, buy another acre,\u201d the actor smiles. In 1963 he built his family a small house on their property, doing the construction work himself, an experience he calls \u201cthe first important thing I accomplished.\u201d By the late sixties, though, the immense popularity of several movies in succession\u2014culminating with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid\u2014gave Redford the means (and sense of empowerment) necessary to make an enormous and what seemed then like a \u201ccrazy\u201d investment. \u201cI want to buy a canyon,\u201d he informed his lawyer. And he proceeded to do so, forestalling a rumored development scheme, which would have parceled the land into quarter-acre lots.<\/p>\n

\"Redford,<\/p>\n

Redford, who also collects contemporary Native American art, has a Fritz Scholder work in his entrance hall. To the right are a Plains Indian bow and wooden arrows. A Navajo wedding basket hangs by the stairway; below it is Hoop Dancer by Stan Johnson.<\/p>\n

For the next ten years\u2014\u201cour Brigadoon decade\u201d\u2014Sundance was a low-key ski resort, stylishly rustic even in those pre\u2013Ralph Lauren days, with some of the finest powder in the West. \u201cIt was the private Shangri-la of a millionaire Hollywood star,\u201d Redford continues, deadpan. \u201cI couldn’t get a bank loan. Every vehicle we had stalled. The waiters didn’t come to work. Our sewers backed up. We were robbed, and the tree in the Tree Room restaurant died.\u201d<\/p>\n

During that period of \u201cspending money and not knowing what I was doing,\u201d Redford also attempted to balance the gains and losses that had come to him with celebrity\u2014and, perhaps in that respect, his domain was an alter ego. He was wary of promoting Sundance, although he did just enough promotion to keep it solvent. He was also fiercely protective of the canyon\u2019s \u201cprivacy,\u201d a word that for Redford implies integrity or soul. \u201cI guess I was impossible to be in business with,\u201d he concludes wryly. And so he bought out his original partners, who couldn’t understand why he so \u201cperversely\u201d refused to expand. He had discovered, though, \u201cthat to keep something intact, you have to keep your own vision of it intact.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Interior<\/p>\n

Interior designers Mary Whitesides and Nancy Maynard continued the rustic theme inside the new guest cottages. The headboard relief carving is of a thunderbird.<\/p>\n

Redford had also begun to realize that the challenge of Sundance was, on a modest scale, a paradigm for the larger challenge that faces urban planners and environmentalists. \u201cWe don\u2019t live in a feudal world. We live in a development-obsessed modern society,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can\u2019t stake out your private nature preserve; you can’t sell people on environmentalism as a spiritual ideal\u2014it has to be viable for other reasons. So the question is, How do you \u2018develop\u2019 without \u2018development\u2019?\u201d An answer to that riddle would come from the actor’s own medium. Redford would \u201cdevelop\u201d Sundance the way one develops a photographic image: by bringing its nuances into focus, without violating its frame.<\/p>\n

The Sundance Institute was established in 1980, and when it finally jelled for Redford as a concept, so did some disparate elements in his own life. \u201cRunning a resort had never been my ambition,\u201d he says. \u201cBut for a long time I didn\u2019t know what my ambition was. I was a big success in Hollywood, and the power that came with that success felt inordinate. But particularly after Downhill Racer, I wanted to continue experimenting with a freer, semidocumentary style of filmmaking. I missed the spontaneity I\u2019d felt as a painter, the visual storytelling . . . passing a saloon, dirty four o\u2019clock light pouring through a door, sketching a barfly.\u201d He winces a little at his own lyricism. \u201cThat loss nagged me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Inside<\/p>\n

Inside a garden shed are wildflowers gathered by Redford on his rides. They are left to dry and are then placed around his house and in the cottages and public areas.<\/p>\n

Not until 1979, when Redford attended an independent film festival in Salt Lake City, did he \u201ctake in the fact that experiments were going on\u2014in provincial garages\u2014and not getting seen. It dawned on me that Sundance was the perfect place to create a community of artists. The ski business could support it\u2014not vice versa, as is usually the case. And managed well, the resort concessions could underwrite the kind of risk taking, diversity, and collaboration that usually don\u2019t get backed in the arts marketplace. As a result, there are no rules here\u2014no production codes. The greatest luxury an artist gets at the Sundance Institute is the freedom to fail.\u201d<\/p>\n

Initially, the institute focused exclusively on cinema, offering summer residence fellowships to screenwriters and directors. Participants from around the country were chosen for the promise and originality of their feature-length scripts, but also for a commitment to the principle of ensemble filmmaking. They spent a month of intense experimental work in a film \u201claboratory\u201d conducted by the institute\u2019s \u201cresource personnel\u201d: mentors such as Sydney Pollack, Waldo Salt, and George Roy Hill. Dialogue among and across the disciplines was encouraged, and fellows had access not only to creative counsel, sophisticated technology, and script readings by professional actors but also to expertise in the areas of marketing and finance.<\/p>\n

\"Those<\/p>\n

Those attending the Sundance Institute\u2019s many performing-arts programs benefit from its facilities, which include a new screening room.<\/p>\n

With the success of the first laboratories\u2014and of the films they later generated (such as El Norte, Desert Bloom, and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez)\u2014the luster of the institute grew. So did competition for acceptance into its expanding programs, which now include laboratories in other performing arts: children’s theater, dance, playwriting, and film composing. Writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak and choreographer Martha Clarke have both been recent fellows. Lyricist Richard Maltby, composer David Shire, and writer Bill Davis have collaborated on a new musical at the institute. And Redford is particularly proud of\u2014and engaged with\u2014its two-year-old Latin American Exchange Program, which brings filmmakers from Central and South America north to Provo Canyon.<\/p>\n

As the brackets of his own career have been painting and directing, one would expect Redford to have a strongly visual imagination. He does, and his exigence is legendary. \u201cBob has a terrifying eye,\u201d an assistant complains fondly. \u201cHe notices if you bring a new six-inch cactus into a thousand-square-foot dining room.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Tree Room is one of the public areas into which Redford\u2019s collection has spilled over. A prize piece is the large Navajo weaving, circa 1930, from the Pinon area, which covers the restaurant\u2019s back wall. To its left is an early-20th-century Karok gathering basket. An alabaster carving stands at left; at right is a handwoven basket from Botswana.<\/p>\n

From the beginning, Redford envisaged Sundance as a place that would be \u201cbig on ideas, small on buildings, with a rustic shell designed to disappear as nearly as possible into the landscape.\u201d Construction materials\u2014the limestone, the old tree-trunk columns, the rough-hewn local cedar\u2014were to echo the canyon\u2019s geology. At the same time, though, Redford insisted on state-of-the-art facilities, furnishings chosen as much for their modern comfort as their Western charm, and on the creation of public spaces that, as he puts it, \u201ccombine indoor intimacy with the outdoor experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

The outdoor experience, of course, as unmediated as possible, is still primary to both Redford and Sundance. There are 50 acres under development by Sundance, and on them are the rehearsal hall and screening room, a gift shop and two restaurants, and farther up the road a carefully sited cluster of private homes and the recently finished rental cottages. But 450 acres are devoted to skiing and recreation, and an area has been set aside to help replenish the wild game that was once hunted. Grouse, mule deer, elk, groundhogs, and a few \u201cstray rutting moose\u201d are now flourishing again, as are six rare species of hawk and eagle. Artists are also encouraged, Redford notes, \u201cto come up for some mountain solitude.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Sepia-toned<\/p>\n

Sepia-toned vintage photographs of the area were used in the cottages.<\/p>\n

Sharing the elixir of that solitude is one of Redford\u2019s greatest pleasures, as a host, an arts patron, and a father. Years ago, when his children were growing up, he encouraged them to go into the mountains for a day alone. They were allowed to take a sandwich, but nothing to read or to play with. His challenge to them was that of a treasure hunt, and the treasure was a sense of connection\u2014through the wilderness\u2014with themselves. \u201cIt was a challenge,\u201d Redford explains, \u201cthat was part of every young Indian\u2019s initiation into his culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Redford has studied Native American culture most of his life, and an Indian blessing opens each summer session of the Sundance Institute. \u201cThe Indians have a sense of balance\u2014a sense of awe, humor and scale in relation to nature\u2014that we lack,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"AA piano is silhouetted in the doorway of the rehearsal hall, which was designed by Backen, Arrigoni & Ross<\/a> as a multiuse facility for dance rehearsals and conferences. At right is Morning Prayer by Apache artist Allan Houser.<\/p>\n

Over the years, however, Redford\u2019s own work as an activist had made him aware that a sense of balance, not to say humor, was missing from the \u201coften boneheaded, inflammatory\u201d discourse between the energy industry and environmentalists. His response was to found the Institute for Resource Management, a nonprofit forum based at Sundance and dedicated, since 1982, \u201cto humanizing the debate, narrowing the distance between representatives of the two sides, if not their actual positions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s too simplistic,\u201d he adds, \u201cto say that environmentalists are elitists interested only in the wilderness, and that developers are gougers interested only in profit. There has to be some form of compromise.\u201d And apparently there is. One of the IRM’s major achievements is to have sponsored negotiations between the oil industry and environmental groups, which in 1986 led to a pact on offshore drilling in the Bering Sea.<\/p>\n

For 20 years, Redford has also been an avid collector of Native American art and artifacts, and his collection of more than 600 has overflowed into the public spaces at Sundance from his own house. That home is a plant-filled solar house built in the seventies of wood, glass, and fieldstone, whose most sumptuous feature is indisputably its setting. The interior space is organized around the light, the art, the fireplaces, and the views.<\/p>\n

A windowless music room with upholstered walls has the circular shape of a Pueblo kiva, and is also used for solitude or conversation. If he brings work home, Redford can retire to a small, round office in the stone tower, or to the monkish \u201cthinking room\u201d directly above it, which has no phone. And before the snows bury them, Redford and his family or guests can contemplate the magical vistas\u2014vistas that would humble any palace\u2014from two rough-hewn pavilions.<\/p>\n

The house is an \u201cenvironment\u201d for his collection, Redford explains, \u201cnot a museum for it,\u201d and the thread of his own experience\u2014its narrative\u2014is interwoven with the history of the pieces. \u201cThe potsherds and arrowheads symbolize my private rummaging,\u201d he says, alluding to the time he has spent camping alone in Chaco Canyon and at other Anasazi sites in the Southwest. Many contemporary Indian artists have become his friends, and he seems to prize their life stories\u2014stories of transience, solitude, and revelation\u2014almost as much as their presents to him.<\/p>\n

While Redford does most of his own \u201crummaging,\u201d the man who keeps track of it, the collection’s unofficial curator, is Brent Beck, who is also the vice-president of merchandising for the Sundance Group. \u201cBob started buying Native American art when he was making Butch Cassidy,\u201d Beck recalls. \u201cAt first he focused on Navajo rugs, and his financial advisers couldn’t understand how you could spend so much on a load of old blankets. But over the years he’s built a collection of great pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n

The collection, Beck explains, is also quite a balanced one, representative of the three major periods in Native American art. There are examples of black-and-white Anasazi pottery from 1100 to 1300. Kachina dolls, totems, beaded vests, and weavings\u2014trading and ceremonial blankets\u2014represent the historic period (up to 1900). Among the modern works\u2014bronzes, sand paintings, pottery, rugs, and oils\u2014several represent important breaks with tradition. \u201cBob has always had real eclectic taste,\u201d Beck says with a smile. \u201cThat’s why you\u2019ll find an Anasazi bowl on a shelf with his Oscar for Ordinary People, and a Hopi kachina next to a weird plastic thing\u2014it’s supposed to be a Sundancer\u2014from a roadside tourist stand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Redford seems to take as much pleasure in these \u201cironic juxtapositions\u201d as in any of his individual treasures. \u201cThe Indians don\u2019t have the monolithic world view that we do,\u201d he says. \u201cTheir art is a constant reminder to me that everything is sacred and nothing is sacred. I try to live that way. You have to risk breaking things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Related: See More Celebrity Homes in AD<\/a><\/p>\n

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest<\/a><\/p>\n

More Great Celebrity Style Stories From AD<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robert Redford, the actor, Oscar-winning director, and environmentalist who forever changed the independent filmmaking scene with his Sundance…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":162305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[98263,236,88,59346,97885,98262,98484],"class_list":["post-162304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-butch-cassidy-and-the-sundance-kid","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-native-american-art","tag-robert-redford","tag-sundance-institute","tag-the-stewarts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}