“Our hope is they’ll associate this place with family long after we’re gone,” says Cristina Wong, referring to the new Overlook home she and her husband Conly are designing. The pair have been deeply involved in the process during the recent pandemic, which has been a welcome distraction.
The Overloook neighborhood they’ve chosen is the highest on Summit Powder Mountain. It sits just above the future village at almost 9000 feet. The lots feature unprecedented views of the Wasatch range, the Ogden Valley, and the Salt Lake Basin. Cristina, Conly, and the rest of their multi-generational family plan on using this home as a frequent retreat.
“We’re definitely city folk,” she explains. “We met while working in New York. I was doing finance for media entertainment companies back then and he was in law. Today we live in LA. He’s an entrepreneur and investor in the multi-family real estate space, and I’m a full-time Uber driver for the kids. [Laughs] They grew up in New York and LA, so they didn’t have a lot of trees.”
Realizing they needed a nature-centered escape, their checklist evolved during their search for a mountain home. “We didn’t want big crowds, and we didn’t need a busy street with tons of restaurants. We have all that at home. We decided we wanted a strong contrast to our day-to-day-living.”
After slipping the word “uncrowded” into their search filters, Powder Mountain emerged as a front runner. “We looked all over Deer Valley and Park City first, and they’re both very nice, but very crowded, and it would have been really hard to find something that fit our needs from a price-point perspective because we wanted a slope-side experience.”
“Powder is unbelievably uncrowded, and the whole inverted mountain concept is something we’d never really experienced. It’s hard to describe until you see it for yourself.”
But the big surprise was the tight-knit Summit Powder Mountain community in place designing the mountain’s future with care and intention. “The folks there, and the people they’re attracting, that was an absolute bonus,” Cristina explains. “We’re completely new to that whole Summit community, but it’s a huge factor that we’re really excited about.”
Wong describes it as “a mixed mindset of open progressives and hippy-capitalists – creatives and entrepreneurs. It’s nice because their philosophy aligns with what we see as important.”
On that note, Cristina and Conly have toured countless new homes, both finished and under construction, to gather ideas for their own. “It’s blown us away. We’re really into the modern construction, modern materials, and clean interiors. And everyone there is encouraging us to be creative and cutting edge. In Park City the design guidelines are very traditional. They reminded us of the cabin with the moose head.”
While they’re no strangers to real estate investing, Cristina and Conly are viewing their Powder purchase through a legacy lens. “Our architect, Anne Mooney, said it best when we were interviewing her. She said, ‘You know, we design homes for people who don’t sell them.’
“We want to build something that lasts for our kids, and our kids’ kids. Our hope is that they’ll associate this place with family long after we’re gone, spending Christmases together, inviting friends. It’s really an investment in our family.”