Above Old Town, an Approved House Isn't a Built One
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Excavators started working the hillside above King Road in the summer of 2025, under a permit issued while the underlying legal fight was still unresolved. The house they were carving into that slope had already cleared the Park City Planning Commission in February 2024 and survived an appeal that same spring. It picked up a signed consent agreement from the City Council in January 2026. As of the last hearing on the public record, a Third District Court judge still had not dismissed the lawsuit that could yet stop it, and had pushed the next round of arguments to June 2026.
That gap, between a project that is approved and one that is resolved, is the part of Old Town's development story that most guides skip. They'll tell you about design review boards and material palettes. What they won't tell you is that a fully code-compliant, twice-reviewed project can sit in legal limbo for years after the last permit gets stamped, because in Old Town the design guidelines were never the real bottleneck. The neighbor next door is.
The house in question sits at 220 King Road, a 1.3-acre parcel Matthew and Tatiana Prince bought in 2020. Prince co-founded and runs Cloudflare and owns The Park Record. The plan replaces two older houses, previously used as nightly rentals, with a single-family home of roughly 7,500 square feet of finished living space and about 6,000 square feet of unfinished basement, with the property notes now specifying it can never return to rental or fractional use.
The Planning Commission's approval in February 2024 required Chair Sarah Hall to break two deadlocked votes. Commissioners spent real time on the site's steep slope and whether a Sensitive Lands Overlay applied to a home office built into the hillside. They concluded the overlay didn't govern, though other steep-slope conditions still did, and attached a long list of requirements: a capped building footprint, a partially raised roofline to break up its length, added landscape screening, and lighting restrictions.
That approval got appealed. In May 2024, the city's Appeal Panel upheld most of it but sent one narrow question, whether a corner of the site fell inside a sensitive lands zone, back for further study. The design questions were, by that point, largely settled.
What kept the project in court for close to two more years wasn't a design dispute. It was three lawsuits in Third District Court: an August 2024 suit from the Hermanns challenging the Planning Commission and Appeal Panel approvals, and two more filed after Park City's Board of Adjustment reversed part of the historic design review, one from the Princes' LLC, Pesky Porcupine, and one from the Hermanns again. The city later combined those last two into a single case. By January 2026, the fight had gone on long enough that the Utah Legislature's 2025 session had passed a law, SB262, letting city councils bypass planning commissions entirely to settle land-use litigation by consent agreement. Park City used it. The Council voted 3-1 on January 15, 2026, to accept a deal in which Pesky Porcupine took on 24 conditions from the historic design review, added landscaping, made road safety upgrades including a new fire hydrant, and agreed to cover the cost of defending the settlement itself.
It still wasn't over. Two weeks later, a judge declined to dismiss the Hermanns' case, ruled on a minor dispute over a six-inch curb, and told both sides that if the city issued a building permit before the litigation resolved, he'd move quickly on any request to halt construction. The next hearing on the record was set for June 2026, a date that has already passed as of this writing without a public update available to confirm the outcome.
Council member Bill Ciraco, who voted for the settlement, framed the decision around fatigue with the fight itself. Council member Tana Toly, whose family has lived in Park City for more than 120 years, said her vote rested on protecting both the historic district and the city's authority to make its own land-use calls. Council member Ed Parigian, the dissenting vote, called the ongoing dispute "the fight over this is just absolutely ridiculous."
Prince, for his part, has pointed to the process itself as proof of good faith.
"No project, no single-family home has ever gotten as much scrutiny as this."
He's not wrong about the scrutiny. He's also not the one who decided how long it would last. That decision sat with a neighbor's standing to sue and a judge's calendar, not with the Planning Department.
King Road isn't zoned like the historic cottages below it. It sits in the Sweeney Master Planning District, a cluster of large hillside lots that sit above and overlook Old Town's traditional 25-by-75-foot lots. The MPD carries its own building envelope, its own height allowances, and its own plat notes, distinct from the small-lot historic zoning that governs Main Street and the blocks around it.
That mismatch is exactly what generates the friction. A house sized to fit comfortably within an MPD's larger footprint can still read as oversized from below, where neighbors' expectations were shaped by a century of narrower lots and shorter roof lines. Six other homes in the Princes' subdivision are reportedly similar in scale, which is the kind of fact that matters to a planning commission reviewing code compliance and matters much less to a downhill neighbor whose sightline just changed.
If you're evaluating a hillside parcel above Old Town, the first question worth asking isn't "what does the design guideline say." It's "which rulebook governs this specific lot, and does it sit at the edge where a large-lot planning district overlaps a small-lot historic block." Disputes cluster at that seam because the two zoning regimes were built for different scales of house, on the same slope, in view of each other.
Steep terrain isn't unusual in Old Town. What changes the timeline is which regulatory thresholds a specific building envelope crosses. Under Park City's Land Management Code, a few numbers matter more than any design opinion:
None of these are exotic. A June 2024 Board of Adjustment hearing over a routine remodel on one of Old Town's steepest lots spent real time on six-foot retaining walls, regrading platforms back to original grade, and a hot tub's placement relative to a side setback. That's an ordinary homeowner project, not a billionaire's, and it still ran into the same geotechnical and grading rules that shaped the King Road case. The scale of the dispute changes with the size of the project. The regulatory triggers don't.
For a buyer or a remodeler eyeing a steep or historic-adjacent lot, the useful due diligence looks less like reading the design guidelines and more like this:
Does a steep slope automatically block construction in Old Town? No. It adds required steps: a Steep Slope Conditional Use Permit if a driveway crosses 30 percent grade, and a licensed geotechnical report if the project disturbs the slope or needs a retaining wall. Those requirements slow a project. They don't stop one that's designed to meet them.
If I buy near a project that's still in litigation, does that risk transfer to me? Not automatically, since standing to sue generally belongs to adjoining property owners. But a pending case can affect construction timing, site access, and even resale conversations for anyone nearby, which is why checking court records for adjoining large-lot parcels is worth the hour it takes.
How long does Historic District Design Review usually take? For a straightforward exterior change, weeks. For a project that intersects steep slope review, a Sensitive Lands Overlay question, or a contested plat note, there's no honest fixed number. The King Road timeline, at least four years measured from the first permit application in 2022 to the most recent court hearing on record, is the extreme case, but it's evidence that the range on a complex Old Town project should be measured in seasons, not weeks.
If you're weighing a hillside lot above Old Town, or trying to read what a specific parcel's slope map and zoning history actually mean for your timeline, that's exactly the kind of question worth working through before you write an offer, not after. Sarah Elder has spent nearly two decades reading Park City's neighborhoods block by block, including the ones where two rulebooks meet on the same hill. Reach out, and let's look at your specific parcel together.
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