If building a five-acre luxury resort sounds complicated, try fighting over one in court.
The Rosewood Hotel and its dreams of 75 hotel rooms and 65 top-shelf condos is now plunged in the thick of bankruptcy proceedings. And instead of pouring concrete and selling homes in Mountain Village, developers and their creditors are arguing over where to litigate the fate of the project, and in which court.

This week, developer Aaron B. Honigman accused his creditors of trying to make an end-run around federal bankruptcy proceedings by pushing ahead with a lawsuit in Colorado state court.

Generally, when businesses files for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, those federal proceedings halt any other legal actions or foreclosures grinding forward in state courts. This is why companies sometimes file for bankruptcy on the eve of foreclosure sales, as a last-ditch effort to ward off their lenders and attempt to regroup and salvage their business.

In Honigman’s case, creditors declared this winter that the developer had defaulted on a $50 million loan. By June 10, San Miguel County was poised to sell Honigman’s five acres of prime Mountain Village real estate when he filed for chapter 11 protection in Michigan bankruptcy court.

“We have made every effort to negotiate in good faith,” Honigman said in a statement at the time. “However, as the dialogue progressed it became apparent that timely resolution could not be achieved. As such, we were left with no other choice but to act — quickly and decisively — in order to protect the integrity of this development and its contractors.”

In April, a group of investors sued Honigman in San Miguel County courts, pushing for a foreclosure sale. Honigman answered with a lawsuit of his own, but the June 10 bankruptcy filing put those suits and countersuits on ice.

In court papers filed Tuesday, Honigman says that his lenders are wrongfully continuing to push the case in state court. He asks that they be forced “not to continue foreclosure litigation against the debtors.”

A lawyer for the main creditors, CarVal Investors and Ramsfield Hospitality, said they’d respond to the charges early next week.

Even the setting of the bankruptcy case has pitted the parties at odds.

Honigman filed for bankruptcy in eastern Michigan, where two of his businesses are registered and a powerful Detroit law firm bears his family name. He wants to keep the case there, according to court pleas.

But his creditors, who are now pursuing their $50 million loan, want the case transferred to Colorado. They argue that the property is in Colorado, that Honigman’s businesses actually operate in Colorado and Utah, and that Colorado law will play a role in any property disputes.

Honigman has been developing the Rosewood project using three limited-liability corporations — West Galena Holdings, Lot 129 and West Galena Real Estate. It was these companies, not Honigman himself, who filed for bankruptcy.

And he argues this: The real-estate investment trusts that lent him $50 million released the money in penurious pieces, harming the construction and sales process for Rosewood and Courcheval, a related Honigman development. They basically set him up to fall, he says.

His main lenders say that they followed the terms of the loan and say that Honigman’s companies defaulted due to mismanagement and cost overruns.

After scoring every planning approval needed to start building in Mountain Village, Rosewood is still little more than an idea overlaid on the grassy ground atop Boomerang Road. The main street sales office was shuttered, and contractors and builders including Telluride Gravel and Alpin Masonry are now lining up to collect their bills.

Papers filed in the bankruptcy court peg the assets of Honigman’s companies at $75.2 million — the value of the raw, developable Rosewood land. Their debts are pegged at $71.6 million.

Honigman owes money to an architecture firm in Dallas, LuxWest Interiors and Tom Kennedy’s law office in Telluride, according to a finance itemization. He owes $1.7 million to himself and $1.1 million to a company whose address matches his own. He owes $3.9 million to the Honigman Foundation, a Michigan nonprofit, and $100,000 to the Rosewood Hotels.

Rosewood, which operates luxury hotels worldwide, did not return two phone messages Thursday.