Carroll Drive, Starwood: Inside the Gated Mesa Above Aspen, Colorado
The road, the gate, the 960 acres, and the 38 acre property at 542 Carroll Drive.
Carroll Drive is the road that climbs up inside Starwood, the gated mesa northwest of Aspen, Colorado. You do not find it by accident. The climb starts off McLain Flats, you stop at a gatehouse that has been staffed around the clock for forty years, and then you go up. The valley falls away behind you. By the time the last switchback straightens out you are at 8,700 feet and the ski mountains are sitting across the valley in front of you. That is Starwood. I have spent most of this year on Carroll Drive, because the house I am selling up here, 542 Carroll Drive, sits on 38 acres of it.
What Starwood Actually Is
It began as a potato and cattle ranch. In 1962 Edgar Stern bought 960 acres of it from Art and Amelia Trentaz for $360,000 and cut the land into 106 parcels. His first plan was a ski resort. That got turned down, so he sold lots instead, and for years he could not move them at $7,500 apiece. There was no gate on the place at all until 1986.
Carroll Drive carries the name of one of Stern's contractors. That tells you what Starwood was at the start: a rancher's mesa being parceled out by a man who could not find buyers, with the roads named after the people who built them.
John Denver bought in and wrote "Starwood in Aspen" about his house on Johnson Drive, inside the same gate. Sixty years on, those same 960 acres hold about a hundred estate parcels, a gatehouse staffed twenty four hours a day every day of the year, a fire station, tennis, groomed cross country trails, and pastures held in common for horses. The lots nobody wanted at $7,500 now trade in the tens of millions.
I keep a fuller write-up of the neighborhood, with pricing and what is currently on the market, in my Starwood neighborhood guide.
The Road Up
The last mile is the part people remember. The drive at 542 Carroll Drive runs about a mile off the road, with bird houses and benches set along it where the view opens up. It is not a drive you take fast. You come up through scrub oak, then aspens, and the valley keeps getting bigger behind you.
At the bottom of that drive is the Shadyside Trail, the shaded half of Aspen's Sunnyside loop. The hiking and the biking begin where the driveway ends. You never get in a car to reach the mountain, because you are already standing on it.
Thirty Eight Acres
38.24 acres on the record. Call it twenty nine football fields. Divide Stern's 960 acres by his 106 parcels and the average piece of Starwood is about nine acres, which makes this one four of them.
Most of it is left alone, and it behaves like a preserve because that is effectively what it is. Elk come through the meadow at first light. Deer live in the aspens. Fox, and now and then a bear walking through like he pays the dues. In July the wildflowers run to the treeline. In late September the aspens turn all at once and the hillside goes gold. In winter it is snow and silence and not much else.
What the Altitude Buys
Sightline. From this shelf of ground you look across the valley at Aspen's ski mountains and past them into the Elk Range, with nothing in between.
Light. When the sun drops behind the peaks, the valley floor goes cold and blue while the mesa is still lit. You get the last gold of the evening every day, from the same chair. In a town where the mountains take the sun early, that is not a small thing.
Quiet. This is the one that does not photograph, and it is the reason people buy up here. Thin air, no road noise, and a gate between you and everything else.
The House at 542 Carroll Drive
Two buildings, 7,223 square feet between them, six bedrooms and seven and a half baths.
The main house went up in 2020 and holds five bedrooms, six full baths, two offices, and a heated three car garage. The guest house followed in 2023: a one bedroom apartment with its own kitchen, living room and covered terrace, sitting on top of a wellness wing that is a gym, a sauna, a cold plunge and a hot tub, all of it open to the peaks.
Outside it is shou sugi ban, the Japanese practice of charring cedar so the wood stops asking anything of you. Inside it is light oak underfoot and gallery white walls, which is a polite way of saying the house was built to hang art on. The kitchen is Boffi, reduced to a single long island of leathered stone with the cooktop set into it, Miele behind the panels, and a wall of glass that slides open to the terrace.
Then there is the unglamorous part, which at this altitude is the part that matters. Radiant floors. Snowmelt at both entrances and both patios. A wood burning stove in the living room and a gas fireplace on the outdoor patio. A two stop elevator. A 7.62 kW solar array. Fire suppression in both buildings, and Starlink, because weather up here is a design problem and somebody sat down and solved it.
The four guest bedrooms in the main house are all ensuite, each with a terrace or a balcony of its own. The primary takes the valley through glass on two sides.
Who Buys on Carroll Drive
This is not somebody's first house in Aspen. It is the second or the third, bought by a person who already knows what a January morning at this altitude feels like and has decided that what they want now is to be left alone. The gate is the point. So is the climb, and so is the fact that thirty eight acres of the mesa comes with it.
I am asking $29,990,000. The current status, the full spec and every photo are on the listing page for 542 Carroll Drive. If you want the longer history of this mesa and the people who filled it, I wrote that one separately: The Mesa Above Aspen.
