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Builders, Owners, & Bears, Oh My

In the early 1990s, Jack and Mary Lou Irwin of Lincoln, Nebraska bought some eight acres on Little Prospect Mountain and in 1994 they built the house we have named BrownHouse Estes. On October 30, 1995, Jack formed a property development corporation, Little Prospect Mountain Village, Inc., with the intention of building several homes on the property.

Jack was born in Omaha in 1935. He was graduated from high school in 1953 and from the University of Nebraska in 1957. Mary Lou was born in Kearney, Nebraska in 1931. The couple were married in 1963. Throughout his life, Jack developed many single-family residential homes, small and large apartment complexes, retail strip centers, and industrial buildings. And together, Jack and Mary Lou owned several businesses including Overhead Door Company and Pella Products of Lincoln and Omaha.

While Jack loved it here in Estes Park, Mary Lou, who died in 2011, did not, and the home, curiously, was rarely used by the Irwins. And while they also built the home at 285 Cyteworth Road right above BrownHouse Estes in 2007, the kitchen appliances sat in the garage and the interior of the home was not finished for nearly five years after the exterior was completed.

Kathy and Chuck Uribe who were friends of the Irwins from Lincoln. The Uribes loved Estes. They had bought a condo in Estes along the river, and when the À La Carte gourmet kitchen store in downtown Estes went up for sale, Kathy bought it and the couple moved to Estes full time.

At some point, the Uribes entered into the land development corporation as partners with Jack, and shortly after Mary Lou’s death in 2011, Kathy and Church moved into the house. In a conversation with Kathy, she explained that the Uribes rented the home from the partnership, and they project managed an extensive renovation of the home in 2012. They replaced the kitchen cabinetry, remodeled the dressing room and master bathroom, and renovating the lower level.

After Jack’s death in 2018, the Irwin estate was inherited by several of their nieces and nephews. At that time, Kathy and Chuck sold their share of the development corporation to Irwin estate and the home was listed for sale. It was purchased in December 2019 by a couple from Texas who owned the home for only a year before putting it back on the market in December 2019 to move closer to family. In a real estate posting after Jack’s death, his longtime friend, right-hand man, and manager of the Fredericksburg Apartments Jeff Willms said of Jack, “His unbridled optimism led to a far-reaching collection of real estate and businesses, and you always knew if he approved of your work if the conversation ended with ‘good boy!’ If he didn’t approve, he was too nice of a man to say it.”

During a family trip to Estes in August 2019, our son Mark encouraged Bill to seriously consider buying a vacation home in Estes. It didn’t take much nudging for Bill to stop in at a realtor’s office and make some inquiries. At the time I thought it was nothing more than a pipe dream and didn’t go with Bill to talk to the realtor. Bill, however, was more interested than I realized. The week between Christmas and New Years of 2019, we returned to Estes Park with our daughter, Maribeth, and her family, and with our son Chris, to look at homes with the idea of maybe…maybe…. buying a house down the road. Gerald Mayo showed us several properties over the course of a week, and that’s when we first toured this house. We were smitten.

We weren’t immediately ready to make the move. it just seemed so radical. Move? To Colorado? What?

We returned in February to tour the house again in route to spending two weeks in Palm Desert. We knew if we were going to do it, this was the right house. But, again, we weren’t quite ready to move from Iowa to Colorado, or so we thought.

A few weeks later, in March 2020, as the Covid pandemic shutdown took hold and as Bill’s law firm sent everyone home to work, Bill began to consider that if he was going to work remotely he could work remotely from anywhere. We began to seriously consider the possibilities, and Bill began to weigh the reality of retiring from practicing law at BrownWinick to begin a new chapter of life in Estes.

We were concerned about what direction the economy was going to go. It was all kind of scary. It took a bit of time to weigh the options, the unknowns, the uncertainties. We would need to sell our house in Iowa; would we be able to during a pandemic? I was in the middle of a PhD program and working on a dissertation that was already taking way too long. But before the summer was over, we had made an offer on what would become BrownHouse Estes and we put our house in Waukee on the market. We closed on this house in August 2020 and moved to Estes on October 1.

One fun story told to us by Cyteworth neighbors Jim and Nancy Gunther is that during the time the Irwins owned the home, a bear crawled in the master bathroom window while the house was being used for vacation by family members. The family members were out at the time, but the bear went into the kitchen and wreaked havoc, relieved itself in the living room, and then when the family members arrived home, it skedaddled back out the bathroom window.

Our neighbors see bear and mountain lions frequently on Little Prospect Mountain. We have seen many elk, including several large herds, and lots of deer, but so far, we have not seen bear or big cats, two things on our bucket list. When we do, that will be cause for a blog post, hopefully with phots.

Guest User 1/21/22 Guest User 1/21/22

The House

Architect Paul B. Saunders of Estes Park designed Brownhouse Estes in 1994 and Mountain Meadow Builders served as the contractor, completing construction in 1996.

Architect Paul B. Saunders of Estes Park designed Brownhouse Estes in 1994 and Mountain Meadow Builders served as the contractor, completing construction in 1996.

Paul and his wife Marilyn retired to Estes Park in 1987 after living in Boulder from 1955 to 1965, and then southern California where Paul had been an architect Imagineer for the Walt Disney Company. He also owned his own firm there.

One of his first assignments when he went to work for Walt Disney was to design a master bathroom suite with a hot tub. At the time, Paul had not yet heard of a hot tub, they were not as ubiquitous as they are today. Walt Disney told him not to worry because his construction crew would take care of building a hot tub, he just needed to design the space the hot tub would go.

Over his many years with Walt Disney, Paul designed numerous rides and buildings at Disneyland, including the Omnimover system dubbed the “endless transit system” to move people on and off the rides, the Tomorrowland makeover, the Monsanto's Adventure Through Inner Space, and the interior of the Haunted Mansion. He is credited with coming up with the idea of using rubber for the expanding frames on the portraits of the people in the entry hall of the mansion. He also designed the Skyway from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland and the Goodyear Autopia racetrack at Walt Disney World.

For more information about Paul’s career as an imaginer, there is an interesting May 8, 2014, podcast interview with Paul conducted by Jeff Baham of the Doombuggies Spookshow that can be found on the internet and on iTunes among other streaming channels. Since URLs are not necessarily stable, if you’re interested in listening it would be best to do a Google search for the interview.

After moving to Estes Park to “retire” (the joke in Estes is that people who come here to “retire” often fail in their attempt and go on to experiencing new career chapters), Paul designed and built several homes and businesses in Estes Park, including the Ravencrest Chalet which is part of a bible school and retreat center on Pole Hill Road just off of Highway 36. With his natural white hair and flowing white beard, Paul played Santa Claus here in Estes Park during the holidays for some 20 years.