Earl Holding, a 74-year-old oil billionaire, pointed to the gray Nike running shoes he was wearing with his business suit and explained, "I've been walking around here so much, my feet hurt."
For nine hours, the press-shy Holding had been touring one of his most unusual investments: the 775-room Grand America Hotel. Lavish even in the world of luxury hotels, it sports tiny heirloom crystals dangling from ballroom chandeliers and marble panels between the urinals in the men's rooms. He's hoping the Grand America will burnish the image of his hometown as the world arrives at Salt Lake's doorstep for next month's Olympics.
Completed this winter after five years of construction, the massive Grand America is more reminiscent of the grandiose 19th century than the cost-conscious 21st. Its 350,000 square feet of granite were quarried in Vermont, ferried through the St. Lawrence Seaway and across the Atlantic to be painstakingly cut in San Sebastian, Spain. Then, the granite was shipped back via the Panama Canal and train to Salt Lake City. About 155 full-time painters worked with tiny brushes to detail the hotel's woodwork.
The Grand America's copper roofs, bronze balustrades and greenery by the Aga Khan's former landscaper would stand out in Rome or New York. So in a town where majestic architecture tends to be confined to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints buildings, residents are taken aback by Holding's creation. Kip Pitou, president of the ski industry association Ski Utah, likens it to the Taj Mahal. "It's like nothing you've ever seen in the state of Utah," he says.
There's a reason: Salt Lake City is a mecca for Mormons from all over the world, but they tend not to be big spenders on lodging here. The 8.5 million Mormons who show up each year are apt to stay with local families or in cheap hotels. Salt Lake City never before had a five-star hotel. Its heretofore highest-class hostelry, the church-owned Hotel Utah, was converted to offices in 1987.
So even though the $150 or so a night that the Grand America has been getting might seem like a bargain to jet setters used to paying upward of $400 a night in New York or London, it's extremely pricey by local standards. In November, the average room rate in Salt Lake City was down 6.3 percent from a year earlier, to $64.92 a night, because of the recession.
Horst Schulze, the longtime chairman of Ritz-Carlton Hotels, has toured the Grand America twice and calls it "mind-boggling" in its lavishness and attention to detail. "It's truly thinking out of the box to invest in a hotel like that in Salt Lake City," Schulze says.
The Grand America is more than a daring profit play for the guarded Holding. Building it helped get the Olympics for Salt Lake City and cinch the highly publicized downhill events for Holding's Snowbasin ski mountain. Moreover, Holding intends for the hotel to anchor new commercial development he is planning for about 50 acres he owns several blocks south of downtown. "If I was 20 years younger," he says, "I could really get going."
He won't disclose the cost of the Grand America. "I don't want everybody to know. It's a lot," he says. Estimates by hotel experts range widely, from as low as $300 million, based on the typical cost of a big luxury hotel, to $775 million, which works out to a million dollars a room.
Holding built the Grand America for cash. "I never did like debt much," he says. He didn't bother to hire consultants to create a business plan or conduct marketing studies. "I don't need anybody to tell me," he says in a rare interview. "I haven't had any studies done at all."
In the early 1990s, the International Olympic Committee sniffed at the Utah capital's unimpressive hotel accommodations. "The IOC didn't think there was a nice enough hotel in Salt Lake City," says Holding. At the time, he was a member of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, though he resigned in 1999, citing conflicts of interest following the scandal in which other committee officials were accused of bribing IOC members. In 1995, Holding and his wife, Carol, volunteered to build a hotel fit for Olympic royalty.
Whatever the prospects of future hotel profits from Mormon pilgrims, business travelers and tourists en route to Utah's ski country, the Olympics have been a boon to Holding and his family. The downhill skiing events will be held at the Holdings' Snowbasin ski mountain, giving it global exposure. The events helped give Holding political clout in Washington to conclude a long-sought, controversial federal land swap. He got 1,320 acres adjacent to Snowbasin, 40 miles north of Salt Lake City, that he plans to use for luxury real-estate development in return for giving the federal government nearly 12,000 acres spread in remote parcels around Utah.
The son of a Salt Lake apartment-maintenance man, Holding was trained as a civil engineer. He got his start as an entrepreneur in 1952 when he and his wife bought Little America, at that time a 60-room motel and gas station 300 miles west of Cheyenne, Wyo. The Holdings transformed it into a famed and heavily advertised highway stop along I-80. By 1969, the Holdings had amassed enough money through a fast-growing gas-station business to buy Mobil Corp.'s refinery in Casper. From there, they branched into pipelines and other oil and gas operations throughout the West.
By the mid-1990s, the Holdings had purchased or built several more hotels, including the luxurious Westgate in San Diego. Among other things, they own a 450,000-acre ranch in Wyoming, the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho, and a mile of private beachfront in Santa Barbara, Calif. Holding, with an estimated fortune of $1 billion, ranks 236th on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans.
Still, the Holdings have bused tables at their ski resorts. Their three children help run the hotels. He has pulled weeds on the lawns of the hotels. Once he sliced open new pillows to make sure the down filling was as advertised. At the Westgate, Holding personally decided what cleaning chemicals would be used to remove carpet stains. During construction of the Grand America, says Mayor Rocky Anderson, "if you asked him how the driveways were coming, you could expect a 15-minute discussion of the materials and the problems they were having with drainage."