How Much Would It Cost To Buy The Overlook Hotel From Stephen King's The Shining?

Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film "The Shining," based 100% faithfully on a novel by Stephen King and leading to no contentious reactions from the author whatsoever, takes place in a remote Colorado hotel called the Overlook. The hotel was built so high up in the mountains that it has to close for the winter, as snowfall makes the roads to the hotel undriveable. Every winter, the Overlook hires a caretaker to ensure the furnaces stay lit and the property is at least somewhat maintained. This means that the caretaker and their family will have to remain there for months, cut off from the rest of the world. This story takes place decades before the inception of the internet, so it's a challenge to find things to do. Loneliness and cabin fever are most assuredly going to set in eventually. 

"The Shining" posits two questions. One: What if a recovering alcoholic writer with a temper (Jack Nicholson) has to take care of the Overlook? Will his sobriety be maintained? And two: What if there was an eerie, bloodthirsty, ghostly presence inside the Overlook that seems to be beckoning the caretaker toward violence and murder? This is going to end badly for someone. 

At the beginning of "The Shining," as the hotel staff are packing up to go, the Torrance family is given a tour. They are shown a large hedge maze, the hotel's game room, its oversized kitchen, and its other amenities. Curiously, the Torrances are not given the hotel's largest, most luxurious room to sleep in.

The wide shots of the Overlook hotel were actually of the real-life Timberline Lodge, located on the side of Mount Hood in Clackamas County, Oregon. The Timberline is still in operation, and has a fun-looking diner, a lot of nearby skiing, and a brewery only six miles down the road. They also sell their own brand of vodka. 

How much would it cost to buy the Timberline Lodge? That's a little difficult to determine.

The Timberline Lodge was designed by architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood sometime in the 1930s, and was one of the larger projects commissioned by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. The building was constructed from 1936 to 1938, and it was made of a lot of recycled materials as to cut down on costs. Hundreds and hundreds of construction workers were given jobs, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited the site during construction to offer a dedication. There's still a plaque on the hotel grounds celebrating its construction. The building was opened to the public in 1938, and FDR imagined that it could provide cheap skiing to the people in the area. 

The Lodge was difficult to maintain, and its various owners took turns neglecting it; no one wanted to go skiing during World War II. It eventually shut down. A caretaker named Richard Kohnstamm re-opened it in 1955, right when skiing was experiencing a boom, and the Lodge was brought back to glorious life. By 1960, the Lodge was turning a profit, and Kohnstamm continued to oversee it until his death in 2006. His family still runs it to this day. (This was confirmed by a clerk at the Timberline Lodge that I spoke to personally.)

Sadly, this means that the Timberline Lodge was never bought or sold on the private market, and its actual real estate value is unknown. It's technically owned by the U.S. Forest Service, and the economics of a publicly owned building are a little murky and difficult to untangle. One may visit the website Showcase.com to find other hotels in the same area to get a line on the Lodge's value; there is a hotel in Maupin, Oregon that is currently going for $5.75 million, but it's very different from the Timberline. 

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd guess the Timberline — with all its restaurants and slopes and distilleries — is worth somewhere in the hundreds of millions range.

While the value of the Timberline Lodge is obscure, we do know the value of the Stanley Hotel, located in Estes Park, Colorado. The Stanley Hotel was the hotel that inspired Stephen King to write "The Shining," making perhaps a more appropriate piece of horror tourism than the Timberline. Back in 1974, when King and his wife Tabitha were passing through Colorado, they were advised to sleep in a tiny hotel an hour outside of town. The couple checked in just as the hotel was shutting down for the winter, the last customers of the season. The hotel was empty, King was served by a bartender named Grady (like in his book), and he began to think of who might have died there. A novel began to form in his head. 

In 2023, the Stanley Hotel sold to a nonprofit company for $475 million, so we now have a price tag. The nonprofit will, according to an article in Cowboy State Daily, build out 58 additional rooms, and construct a screening room, no doubt to host screenings of "The Shining." The article also noted that the Stanley was first built in 1909 by F.O. Stanley, a photography pioneer. Stanley, the story goes, invented and sold a new type of photo plate to Kodak, making him very, very rich. He opened the hotel to serve the rich and famous, so it was always meant to be a fancy, high-profile lodging. 

If you wanted to buy the Stanley, it's unlikely you'd be able to wrest it from the companies that just purchased it. Even if you have the half-billion on hand to make the purchase, they may not be willing to sell.