WHERE THE WEST IS STILL WILD
ABOUT
Located just steps from everything Buena Vista has to offer, Shorehouse Hotel is a four suite mountain retreat. Each suite provides the amenities needed to be the perfect home base for your mountain getaway. From the art on the walls to the soap in the bathrooms, our goal is to immerse you in the local culture at every turn. Easily walk down Main Street to local restaurants, bars and shopping, but also to mountain biking and hiking trails, a river park with surf waves, and so much more.
And if adventure is what you seek, Buena Vista is nestled in a county where 80% of the land is public. Home to the highest concentration of 14,000’ peaks in the continental United States, and a gold medal river, there’s always something new to explore.
THE KINGMANS
Brad and Megan Kingman are the experts when it comes to river culture and adventure. They’ve been helping visitors create unforgettable experiences in the Arkansas Valley since the early 2000’s. Starting as river guides, they eventually expanded their love for adventure by becoming the proud owners of the iconic CKS River Supply store in 2016.
The Kingmans have lived abroad, managed resorts, and worked in hospitality for a number of years. They lived and traveled to places across the world but always felt pulled back to Buena Vista — moving here full time in 2012. Though their primary job has been CKS, they have experience building houses, remodeling, and feel passionate about designing a space with intentionality.
“This project is a culmination of our passions — our store, our valley, our experience and our design all in one,” — Megan.
Shorehouse is their way of sharing the beauty they’ve experienced during their time on the water and the laid back acceptance they’ve found in river culture. They have since traded questionably dangerous river adventures for raising their two young boys. But still spend as much time as they can getting their family outside.
“You belong among the wildflowers
You belong in a boat out at sea
Sail away, kill off the hours
You belong somewhere you feel free”
THE HISTORY
A place with a past.
Shorehouse Hotel is built around the original location of the town brothel. This history wasn’t something to erase, but instead embrace and incorporate. Working with local architect, Steve Carr, this historic building on Main Street has been given a new chapter. Speaking in river terms, keeping the “hole in the middle” creates an eddy, or a way forward. This historic building became the poetic link that we needed to set our vision into motion. And it doesn’t hurt to have a little historic town gossip to talk about.
Steve Carr
An architect named Steven Holl said, “Architecture is bound to situation. And I feel like the site is a metaphysical link, a poetic link, to what a building can be.”
CKS River Supply evolved naturally, logically, and poetically as a sum of all of its parts. For decades it has been an integral part of Buena Vista’s Main Street and essential to the white-water culture of the Arkansas Valley. It is also a community spirit vessel that embodies a common experience, young and old, native or visitor. As an ideator for the next generation home for CKS, it was important to me that it captured 140 years of embodied experience and at the same time didn’t take itself too seriously.
As a good neighbor The Shorehouse would need to have a building massing and scale that is appropriate for the downtown district. It also would need to compel people to experience Main Street in the same way that it has for decades, only better. Having the historic brothel at its core was a huge opportunity and became the poetic link to place that the Kingman’s needed.
The Brothel as an impediment, also set in motion a thinking that keeping the “hole in the middle” would, speaking in river folk terms, create an eddy, where Main Street wanderers would be drawn to pause, slow down, take it easy for a bit, and smell the merchandise.
The art and architecture of CKS River Supply at The Shorehouse is intended to evoke emotion and consciously or unconsciously a sense of well-being, belonging, and a history of place.
“We all travel the milky way together, trees and men … trees are travellers, in the ordinary sense. They make journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true: but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-waving – many of them not so much.”
