Edgar Stern Jr., who developed the exclusive Starwood neighborhood outside of Aspen and served as an early board chair of the Music Associates of Aspen, died Sunday in Seattle at the age of 86.

Stern was the founder of the Deer Valley resort in Park City, Utah, as well as the founder of the Stanford Court Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco.

After serving in World War II, he co-founded with his father the first commercial TV station in the Gulf Coast region, WDSU in New Orleans. He then helped create two hotels and developed one of the first air-conditioned shopping centers in the New Orleans area.

Stern moved to Aspen in 1968 and developed Starwood in the early 1970s after buying the ranch from the Trentaz family. It was Aspen’s first gated community and still is one of the few with a fully staffed guard house at the entrance.

“It began slowly,” said Jim Bulkley, 81, an attorney who represented the early homeowners in Starwood. “He was very concerned because he wasn’t selling any lots.”

Bulkley said McLain Flats Road was still a dirt road then and Starwood seemed too far away from Aspen for some potential buyers, especially as Red Mountain was the social epicenter at the time.

“Aspen hadn’t grown enough to attract people who had deeper pockets and preferred to be out of town,” Bulkley said.

That would soon change.

Today, Starwood is one of Aspen’s most exclusive residential subdivisions. It is where Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia chose to build his large home and where John Denver lived.

Bulkley said that Stern was “a man of complete integrity” who often did even complex business deals on a handshake basis.

Bulkley was chairman of the county hospital in Aspen when Stern led the drive as president of the Aspen Valley Medical Foundation to raise money for a new hospital on Castle Creek Road, which is now planned for a major renovation.

Stern also was instrumental in founding Aspen Country Day School in 1969 and was a major supporter of the Aspen Music Festival and School and a force on the board of the Music Associates of Aspen, which governs the festival and school.

“The organization grew under his leadership and the board became more active in managing the affairs of the festival,” said Fonda Paterson, who is on the MAA board today. “He was a major underwriter of the festival and he worked hard to involve the local business community with the festival.”

Stern is listed as a lifetime trustee of the music school and he helped establish the now dormant Aspen Valley Improvement Association.

Charlie Paterson, also a lifetime trustee of the music festival, said he remembers that Edgar and his wife Polly were gracious to Aspen locals.

“He invited people all the time up to his house in Starwood,” Paterson said. “At his goodbye party, he invited everyone who worked on his house to come up.”

The Sterns moved to Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands in 1986 where he served as president of the board of the San Juan Community Theatre and contributed to many local community organizations.

While he was still living in Aspen, Stern developed both the five-star Stanford Court Hotel in San Francisco and the Deer Valley ski area, which opened in 1981.

According to the Stern family, at Deer Valley Edgar Stern “achieved his dream of combining the sport of skiing with the service, food and amenities of a five star hotel.” (See obituary, page 6.)

In a 1999 article in the Deseret News, Stern said part of his motivation came from shoddy conditions in Aspen.

“‘I remember, at the time, I was skiing at Aspen and noticed that the resort gave the employees one jacket, which was often very dirty, and followed no dress code. They looked awful and were very impolite. No one seemed to care about anything. The seats were uncomfortable, the food was terrible and the lodges were too small. You had to stand up to eat,’” Stern told the Deseret News.

“He decided if he ever built a resort, it wouldn’t be like that.

“‘When I built Deer Valley I said let’s go in the absolute opposite direction. A lot of people told me it would never work, that I was crazy. In the beginning, when the cost overruns were so high, I wondered. But there are people looking for this kind of service ... and it worked.’”

Today, Deer Valley still sets the industry benchmark for a luxury ski resort experience, and is one of two major ski areas that does not allow snowboarding. Readers of Ski magazine named it their favorite ski area in the country the last two years.

Stern’s company, Royal Street Land Co., still runs the resort and Stern retired from the company in 2007.

Stern also once owned the Park City ski area. He was instrumental in bringing the U.S. Ski Team to Park City and strongly supported freestyle skiing events at Deer Valley, according to Ski Racing magazine.

While living in Aspen, Stern became a close friend of ski legend Stein Eriksen, who was once a fixture at Snowmass Ski Area. Eriksen followed Stern first to Park City and then to Deer Valley where he remains director of skiing.

Eriksen told the Deseret News in 1999 that he, like Bulkley, took Stern at his word, saying that for many years he worked for him on a handshake basis.

bgs@aspendailynews.com