Ridgway, Colorado · San Juan Mountains
A luxury glamping resort and future community built on the belief that where you live should be designed for people, governed by them — and grown by the market, not a master plan.
Discover the visionWhat we're building
Arroyo Commons begins as a collection of beautifully designed Airstream suites near Ridgway, Colorado. It grows into something more ambitious: a permanent walkable, bike-first community where the street network and governance are designed — and everything else is left to individual lot owners, builders, and the market.
This is the synthesis that urbanists like Alain Bertaud and Jeff Speck have been pointing toward: design the infrastructure that markets can't self-organize, then get out of the way. The most beloved urban places in the world weren't master planned — they grew organically within a framework. Arroyo Commons is that framework.
Our principles
Bike paths are the primary circulation network. Streets are guests. Every spatial decision starts with the pedestrian — because the evidence shows this is what makes people happier, healthier, and more connected to their neighbors.
Community decisions are made by randomly selected resident juries using score voting — not whoever shows up loudest to HOA meetings. It defeats faction capture, produces genuine legitimacy, and treats governance as something worth designing carefully.
Arroyo Commons designs the street network, bike infrastructure, and governance framework — then sells lots to individual builders within a simple form-based code. Architecture, density, and mix of uses emerge from market demand, not a developer's vision. The West Village wasn't master planned. Neither was Montmartre. The framework is the design.
The experience
Each Airstream suite is designed with the aesthetic sensibility of a well-curated Portland loft — dark walnut paneling, poured concrete surfaces, unlacquered brass, deep velvet — set against one of the most dramatic mountain landscapes in North America.
The governance model
Every community makes choices about infrastructure. Arroyo Commons makes one additional choice that no comparable project has made: it bakes a genuinely better democratic mechanism into its founding documents from day one. The physical form emerges from the market. The governance is designed.
"Rather than board seats being captured by whoever campaigns hardest or turns out the most organized faction, a randomly selected jury of residents holds the election — deliberating on candidates and scoring them 0–5. The board they elect governs the community."
Where we're building
The San Juan Mountains around Ridgway offer the most dramatic landscape in Colorado and the most permissive regulatory environment on the Western Slope. Ouray County's light-touch approach means we build what we believe in without years of entitlement battles.
Telluride is 30 minutes away. World-class cultural infrastructure, without the world-class price tag.
Why Colorado
Intellectual foundations
NYU urbanist and former World Bank principal planner who argues that markets are the indispensable mechanism for city development — and that planners should design infrastructure and expand land supply, then step aside. Arroyo Commons is his thesis applied from day one.
City planner and author who quantified what makes streets work for people rather than cars — and demonstrated that walkability isn't ideology, it's the precondition for urban vitality. The Arroyo Commons street network is designed around his ten steps to a walkable city.
Engineer and urbanist whose incremental development framework shows why small, financially productive buildings built gradually outperform large master-planned developments over time. Arroyo Commons starts with one Airstream precisely because Marohn is right: prove it small before you build it big.