Gorge founders envision resort with arts theme
That was back in 1980, when the Seattle couple bought a chunk of benchland on the Columbia River to grow wine grapes — high, dry, windswept desert dotted with sagebrush that affords one of the most spectacular panoramas in the Western United States.
Rock fans know this view well, from the Gorge Amphitheatre, in George, Grant County, the venue the Bryans opened in 1985 and sold eight years later.
Last year, the Bryans started listening to the land again. The result is a vision for an "arts-based resort" they call Sagecliffe, a kind of renaissance retreat where people would come for rest and relaxation, but also where great minds — artists, scientists and intellectuals — would mingle with each other and the general public.
A 500-acre spread, Sagecliffe would be constructed on land the Bryans held onto next to the amphitheater.
Carol Bryan already can see Sagecliffe in her mind's eye. A cluster of buildings on a small rise is one of several "hilltop villages," where overnight guests or second-home owners play a round of golf, take that drawing workshop they'd put off all their lives, then stop for a snack at the "commons," perhaps winding up in a casual conversation with a great painter, potter or botanist.
"We would like to be able to have the opportunity to create a place where we're not only celebrating the richness of the planet," says Vince, a retired neurosurgeon, "but the greatness of mankind. We think people are thirsty for this."
Arts groups signing on
Sagecliffe is slated to open in 2007. Construction has begun on a precursor project opening in April, The Inn at Cave B, with 15 stand-alone rental units, a 12-room inn and an adjacent lodge with restaurant and conference center.
Significant obstacles lie ahead: Government agencies need to sign off, and investors with deep pockets need to be found.
But Seattle arts leaders already are signing on. Theater managers at ACT and Intiman are discussing doing versions of Seattle productions and a play-development workshop. The Seattle Symphony Orchestra is interested in a summer program. The University of Washington ceramics department and Cornish College of the Arts are discussing artist-in-residence programs and outdoor Greek drama.
The specifics remain to be worked out. But the Bryans are keying in to a significant social trend: the baby-boomer demand for ever-more-sophisticated leisure activities that promise personal transformation.
"People are looking for experiential travel," says Tracey Wickersham, director of cultural tourism for Seattle's Convention and Visitors Bureau. "They want something unique and enriching, and they really are willing to go off the beaten path to find it."
The Bryans may be able to provide that experience, says Seattle booking agent Mark Solomon, who arranged the first concerts at the Gorge in 1985. "They've always been visionaries. And I think they're pretty canny, too."
Bought land for vineyard
Vince Bryan is a focused, fit man who marches up hills like a teenager and peels around on his ATV like one, too, kicking up streaks of dust. Whether the subject is wine and architecture — his passions — or golf and rock 'n' roll — his default businesses — he is an attentive, curious and intellectually omnivorous listener.
Hard-headed scientist one moment, deliberately mysterious the next, he is as comfortable recounting the geological history of the Columbia Gorge — "Now don't go back 500 million years again," nudges Carol — as he is alluding to the "magic" of Sagecliffe. He declined to reveal his age (he is in his early 60s) or to explain why he named the winery "Cave B."
Vince and Carol met in high school in Chicago and have been married 40 years. While Vince established a Seattle neurosurgery practice, Carol stayed home, raising their four children, then went back to school for a master's in sociology.
In 1995, Vince retired from surgical practice to co-found Spinal Dynamics, which developed a cervical disc prosthesis known as the Bryan Cervical Spinal Disc. Spinal Dynamics was sold in 2002 for $270 million.
The Bryans originally bought land at the gorge to start a vineyard. Very soon, however, says Vince, they noticed "a rather remarkable acoustical property out on the cliff. If either Carol or I was standing up on the top and the other person was way down below, in this one location, if you whispered like this, whether you were 100 or 1,000 feet away, you could hear it as if you were standing next to the person."
The Bryans transformed that "acoustical property" into the Gorge Amphitheatre, but even after they turned the concert booking over to professionals, the family continued to vacation there every summer, overseeing the shows, swimming in the Columbia, hiking to the Ancient Lakes, tending their vines and enjoying the spectacular sunsets over Colockum Ridge. Their kids' college pals helped get in the grape harvest.
Retired, with their kids grown, four years ago they fashioned a modern house (they had previously slept in a trailer) around a cascade of basalt stones they left exposed beside an interior staircase, revived the winery and started planning a destination gourmet restaurant.
In a conversation around the kitchen table, Greg Mollner, Sagecliffe's lead financial and project adviser, talked them out of the restaurant. But Mollner, who managed the financial restructuring of Seattle's Paramount Theatre for Microsoft millionaire Ida Cole, encouraged the Bryans to brainstorm about their inspirations for developing their property.
One, says Vince, was his experience during his medical residency at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
"Every month," he says, "my surgery professor would invite the greatest of the profession, worldwide, to come to Northwestern. We would meet them at the airport and talk the talk, walking shoulder to shoulder, getting to know them as individuals, feeling their presence and understanding their genius. That was one of the great thrills of my life."
Another inspiration was the environment.
"We never really felt like we owned this land," Vince says. "It was almost a national-park situation."
Such inspirations are reflected in Sagecliffe's design, by Tom Kundig of Seattle's Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen, noted for museums and art collectors' homes. Whenever possible, buildings would be constructed from local materials, like the walls of the Inn at Cave B units, which are made of composite, hand-fabricated panels of concrete, basalt and sand.
Lodging plans include 14 to 18 founder homes, 50 to 60 condos, a 30- to 40-room main lodge (with restaurant) and 240 more rental rooms dispersed among cabins and a more-modest inn. Other buildings on the drawing board are an indoor and outdoor theater, a half-dozen artist studios, gourmet restaurant, culinary center, conference center, pro shop, equestrian center and "arts vistas" placed strategically around the property.
Walking the land, Vince points out architectural details as if they were already there.
"Picture yourself going through this cavelike stone," he says, striding through the cliffside restaurant site and scaring up a mourning dove. "On your right here is an exposed rock wall. Then you'll emerge into an open space. It'll be very intimate, divided in small sections, where you can have a five-hour meal and watch the sun go down. Then, at night, all of this will be lit from below. You can actually be outside on the cliff looking back at the plateau."
A roll-back roof for "starlight seating" is being discussed as well.
Even the golf course is designed to follow the natural contours of the land. To encourage direct experience with the environment, golf carts would not be allowed, except for folks with disabilities.
"The environment says, 'This is what I am, just complete the process,' much like the amphitheater was an amphitheater long before we got there," says Vince.
Several hurdles
Before the Bryans' vision can become reality, several hurdles must be jumped.
For starters, some may argue that what they hear the land saying is, "Leave me alone."
A high-desert golf resort requires massive amounts of water, which the Bryans have addressed with a 973-foot well capable of pumping 2,000 gallons a minute.
The Bryans own just 238 of Sagecliffe's proposed 500 acres outright. The rest belongs to the U.S. Department of Interior Bureau of Reclamation and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. A lease with the DNR is a "done deal," Vince says, but a management agreement with the feds has yet to be signed. Nor has Sagecliffe's Master Plan Resort been approved.
Grant County's director of planning, Scott Clark, says local feeling about Sagecliffe is "generally very positive." He expects the approval process to be completed by March. The Gorge Amphitheatre, after all, created jobs and a major boost in tax revenue for the county.
Then there is the matter of capitalization. Sagecliffe's financial structure — a $65 million to $70 million, for-profit limited-liability company with a sister nonprofit arts foundation is, like the Bryans, an interesting mix of business instincts and lofty ideals. Each founding member would receive a single-family home and an interest in any profits the project yields. Investment advisers say several thousand families in America have both the passion for the arts and the net worth — about $30 million — to consider such an investment. Mollner needs to find and convince up to 18 of them to be founders.
The foundation would be kick-started by an 8 percent cut from each founder's investment. The Bryans, who retain a 40 percent interest, have donated half of that to the foundation, which would offer scholarships to ensure Sagecliffe isn't patronized only by the wealthy.
Lodging at Sagecliffe, Mollner says, would probably range from $125 to $350 per night, and dinner from $50 to $150.
Sagecliffe must attract customers, too, notably golfers whose $100-plus course fees would drive its financial engine.
Mollner acknowledges the region's golf industry is overbuilt but thinks Sagecliffe's dramatic setting — "one of the only canyon-rim courses in the country" — would sell itself.
Maybe. But why would golfers and Sunday painters want to share the same resort?
"They're married to them, that's why," quips Susan Trapnell, managing director of Seattle's ACT Theatre. "The fact is, people have many interests, so I think that actually is a promising thing, to assume that you have a variety of interests in one human being, and certainly within a couple or a family."
The thirst of boomers
Trapnell, along with Cornish College President Sergei Tschernisch and other leaders in the Seattle arts community, has been enthusiastically participating in Sagecliffe planning.
"They're just contagious," Tschernisch says of the Bryans.
Ultimately, Sagecliffe's success may hang on a broader social trend: the continuing thirst on the part of baby boomers for transformational experience.
"[Sagecliffe] is an answer to a lot of what consumers are asking for now," says Howard Glassroth, vice president of communications for the American Resort Development Association. "Multigenerational travel, eating in a beautiful environment, getting back to values."
Back at the house, after a wild, dusty ride up hills and around curves across the land — with stops for detailed descriptions of buildings that exist, as yet, only on a huge map studded with green fairways — Vince pops open a bottle of wine.
Clearly, for the Bryans, Sagecliffe already is real. It's just a matter of getting everyone else to believe in it. After all, Carol says coolly, "We've accomplished everything else we set out to do."
Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com.
