By Jill Abramson
Photos by Jen Judge
DEPARTURES exclusively debuts the transformation of Ted Turner’s private house Casa Grande, in New Mexico, into a luxury lodge—and shows why the property matters for protecting the American West.
Billionaire Ted Turner should be grateful to an earlier owner of his western residence Casa Grande, who covered its floors with ugly gold carpeting. Once the showplace of Vermejo Park Ranch, in northern New Mexico, near Raton, the house was boarded up and hidden behind aluminum storm windows for decades leading up to a nearly four-year, multimillion-dollar top-to-bottom renovation. Tile by tile, inch by inch, every room and piece of furniture has been brought back to its original gilded beauty. All that gold carpet had protected the now glowing mosaic floor tiles. Those aluminum storm windows kept the original glass panes from damage. Gilt had covered the original subway tiles in the bathrooms, but they are, once again, gleaming white.
In 1996 Turner bought all 580,000 acres of the vast ranch. Casa Grande was built from 1907 to 1909 by a wealthy Chicago grain trader, William Bartlett, who aimed to bring luxury to his western hunting and fishing paradise. He moved huge marble columns once destined for a Chicago bank to New Mexico and hired one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentors, Joseph Lyman Silsbee, to design his casa. Over the decades it has been a private home, a fancy lodge, and even a club for such Hollywood stars as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Now Casa Grande, which reopened in February, is a new lodging option for Vermejo’s guests (usually 4,000 to 5,000 of them annually). Many are repeat visitors who come for the skiing, hunting, and fishing, and who have stayed at the ranch’s two other properties: Casa Minor, which was built near Casa Grande for Bartlett’s son, or Costilla Lodge, 25 miles from the main house.
One person who hasn’t seen the stunning Casa Grande renovation is Turner, who, with about 2 million acres of land, is the second-biggest private landowner in the United States (only John Malone, another cable magnate, surpasses him, with 2.2 million acres). With a fortune estimated at $2.2 billion by Forbes, Turner calls the ranch his private Yellowstone, and it’s not much of an exaggeration: Vermejo, which is believed to be the largest piece of privately owned contiguous land in the U.S., is about one-fourth the size of the national park. It’s not easy to get to Vermejo on commercial airlines, as the nearest major airports, in Denver and Albuquerque, are both more than a four-hour drive away.
Casa Grande is the luxurious cornerstone of Ted Turner Expeditions (TTX), the mogul’s new ecotourism company that now gives travelers access to more than 1.1 million acres of Turner’s land through four different properties in New Mexico: Vermejo, Sierra Grande Lodge in southern Truth or Consequences, and the south-centrally located Ladder and Armendaris Ranches. Like Vermejo, the other ranches have all been owned and run by Turner for years, but now that they are being overseen by TTX, the properties will be geared toward initiatives in line with Turner’s conservation vision. The idea is to one day have all of Turner’s land—including that in Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Argentina—under the TTX umbrella. In fact, Turner’s South Carolina island, St. Phillips, recently became a TTX location.
At age 77, Turner is still ruggedly handsome, with hair and mustache turned white. “I see our Expeditions as a complement to the national parks,” Turner told me when I met him at his office in Atlanta, where he founded CNN, once owned the Atlanta Braves, and can run downstairs to his chain restaurant, Ted’s Montana Grill (he has 46 of them). Bison is the house specialty. “They breed like crazy,” he said with enthusiasm. He should know; he has the largest herd in the world.
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