Order a burger at The Buena Viking on a Tuesday night and you'll eat it a few feet from a building nobody had to keep. The old wood structure sits wedged in the courtyard between the restaurant and CKS River Supply next door, leaning a little the way buildings do after 140 winters, doing nothing more useful than standing there. Most towns would have flattened it for parking. Buena Vista built two new businesses around it instead.
That decision, small and specific, is the whole story of what happened on this stretch of East Main Street. Not the burgers, not the hotel upstairs, not the gear shop. The choice to keep a former brothel standing in the middle of a construction site tells you more about how this block works, and how the town thinks about its own Main Street, than any of the businesses that now surround it.
A vacant lot, a friendship, and a building nobody wanted gone
The land came up for sale in December 2020. Megan and Brad Kingman, who own CKS River Supply, bought it with a specific problem already in mind: the historic building sitting in the middle of the lot, a former brothel from the 1880s, had survived long past the point where most owners would have cleared it. Megan's father, architect Steve Carr, designed the project around keeping it exactly where it was, using it as the anchor for an open courtyard between two new buildings rather than something to work around or knock down.
Next door, Evan and Anna Winger had spent seven years building The Buena Viking from a used food truck they bought off Craigslist into the kind of local institution that gets voted Buena Vista's favorite burger, and favorite food truck, year after year since 2017. They'd been renting lots around town the whole time, first next to Deerhammer Distillery, later in the alley behind Buena Vista Roastery Café, always one lease renewal away from having to move again. When the Kingmans offered them part of the new lot, the Wingers didn't hesitate. Megan later put it simply: the two businesses had good energy together, and everybody involved trusted the others' taste enough to build something permanent side by side.
Construction started in spring 2023 after financing came together through the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority and High Country Bank. The original target was a November opening. Main Street construction being what it is, The Buena Viking's doors actually opened on February 23, 2024, with family and friends packed into a restaurant that seats about sixty in winter. CKS followed that spring, and the Shorehouse Hotel opened to the public that May 1, celebrated with a grand opening party the Friday before featuring live music on the Viking's patio and what the flyer called a "BV Fanciest" dress code.
What's actually stacked above your burger
Most people who eat at the Viking or rent a paddleboard at CKS never look up. There are two small lodging operations built directly into this same footprint, and each one was designed with a level of local specificity that a chain hotel would never bother with.
Above the restaurant sits the Even Keel Lodge, three suites named for parts of a ship. The Crow's Nest is a two bed, two bath apartment built to sleep up to six. The Hygge Studio is smaller and south-facing, meant for one or two people who want to be in the middle of town without needing much space.
Above CKS, the Shorehouse Hotel took a different approach. Rather than generic decor, Megan Kingman asked four local women artists to each design a suite around their own work and life. The result is four rooms that read more like a small gallery than a hotel floor:
- The Throne Room, sleeping seven, built around artwork by Darcie Smith, a Colorado native who lives in Buena Vista
- Layover Day, sleeping three, featuring work by Brynn Ronning, who lives in town with her husband Eddie Sandoval and whose family runs The Asian Palate, a Thai and sushi restaurant that's been part of Buena Vista's food scene since 2008
- Daisy Chain, sleeping two, with work by Lindsay Sutton-Stephens, who has lived and made art in Salida for eighteen years
- The Magpie Room, sleeping four, showcasing Jennie Noreen Omasta, who took over ownership of Rock Run Gallery in Buena Vista in October 2021
None of these details show up on a map or a listing photo. They're only visible if someone tells you, which is most of what makes a place feel like it belongs to the people who live there instead of the people passing through.
The metalwork is local too, on purpose
The interior finishes carry the same logic. Rather than order standard fixtures, the Kingmans commissioned metalwork from two Buena Vista artisans, Sean Geisler of Moonhill Ironworks and Zach Wilhoit of Branch Welding, to build out the space. It's a detail easy to miss while you're waiting on a burger, but it's consistent with everything else about how this project got built. At almost every decision point, from the architect to the artists to the metalworkers, the people behind this block chose someone from town over someone from a catalog.
Megan Kingman described the lot itself as sitting on one of Buena Vista's quirkier street plans, and the finished courtyard reflects that. It isn't a straight line of storefronts. It's a former brothel with a patio wrapped around it, flanked by a burger restaurant on one side and a river outfitter on the other, with two small hotels tucked above both.
Why the preservation choice matters more than the burgers
Buena Vista has a Historic Preservation Commission, an advisory group formed in 2015 that reviews changes to historic properties and has developed design guidelines meant to keep new construction on Main Street from erasing what's already there. The commission doesn't have the power to force a private property owner to save a building. What it represents is a town-wide expectation, one that the Kingmans and Wingers clearly absorbed before a single permit was pulled.
That's the part worth sitting with. Nobody made this building stay standing. The lot could have been cleared in a week, and a version of this project with a parking lot instead of a courtyard would have worked financially just as well. The owners chose the harder, slower version, one that required an architect to design around an obstacle instead of removing it, because the alternative would have made East Main Street look a little more like anywhere else.
The next time you're waiting for a table at the Viking, walk the perimeter of that old building once before you sit down. It's not much to look at on its own. But it's the reason the burger, the hotel room, and the gear shop all feel like they belong to the same place instead of three separate transactions on the same block.
If you're already living in Buena Vista, you probably know a dozen stories like this one, tucked into buildings you pass without a second look. That's most of what makes this town worth staying in. If you're thinking about where a story like this one fits into your own plans here, whether that's a move within the valley or a longer look at what's around the corner, Mary Kale has spent more than twenty years learning which corners of Buena Vista have stories like this one behind them. Contact Mary Kale when you're ready to talk about it.
