I’ve stayed at several Quintess and Exclusive Resorts houses. My most recent was a Quintess place at the mountaintop in Telluride. The house was beautiful, but it was a side-by-side duplex, so it was dizzyingly tall with relatively small floors and lots of stairs. Normally that’s OK, but at that altitude even Lance Armstrong would be huffing and puffing. In fairness, there’s an elevator but it’s as slow as a Harvard MBA working through “My Pet Goat.”

The interior is nicely appointed though somewhat overdecorated. Final gripe is that the cleaning staff was pretty lackadaisical. Some days they’d skip a bathroom here and there. Other days they’d cheerily show up and all-too-quickly excuse themselves since we were still at the house. They’d say “we don’t want to bug you…we just usually make the beds, so we can skip if we’d be in the way.” They’d be halfway back to their car before we could say, “no, please come in.”

The good stuff: kitchen, BBQ deck, hot tub, view all great. A very nice theater for dumping the kids while grown-ups chow down.

Suggestions

Tighten up standards on cleaning.