Two Weeks or Four Years

Buyers and brokers of Aspen: I would be presumptuous, indeed, to argue with anyone who wants to build their own house in Aspen, Colorado. William Jennings Bryan opened his Cross of Gold speech almost exactly that way, and so will I.

The most expensive house in Aspen is the one you haven't built yet.

Buy the land. Hire the architect. Build exactly what you want. I understand the appeal.

Then you meet Pitkin County.

By the end of this, I'll show you why building on a Starwood lot costs as much as or more than 542 Carroll Drive, on a fraction of the land and four years down the road.

As I write this, there are four lots listed for sale in Starwood on the Aspen MLS. They run from 2.35 to 4.37 acres, and from $5,450,000 to $14,900,000. Three are bare land. The fourth still has a 1967 house on it. One of them is already under contract.

That buys you dirt.

It is also expensive dirt to hold. Colorado taxes bare land at roughly four times the rate of a finished house.

I wanted to show this amazing new listing at 542 Carroll Drive in its best possible light, so I brought my two videographers from Miami to Aspen. (You can see what they made: the film and the tour.) After shooting all day and into the night, I dropped one of them at his hotel in Snowmass around 11. Nobody was on staff after 7. They had left us a treasure map to a lockbox where the key would be waiting. What do you do if you can't decode the chicken scratch? What do you do if you have a real emergency? Thirty minutes of walking in circles in the dark later, we found it.

The next day he left his key in his room, and the cleaning crew decided the best thing to do was lock the door with the key still inside. At 11 again, nobody at the front desk. Nobody to greet you. An 800 number to a call center somewhere overseas that held us for 30 minutes, heard the problem and hung up. I found more numbers on Google and with AI, but not even AI can help when nobody is behind the wheel.

Two hours later, with my videographer ready to kill me for booking him into this fine, service-driven hotel, I got someone on the phone who was either asleep or inebriated. Thirty minutes after that, in rolled the hotel's 24/7 property manager, and he opened the door. I'm fairly sure he wasn't sober. I just hope he didn't have far to drive.

If a hotel can't get a man back into his own room, imagine getting a house through Pitkin County.

542 Carroll Drive · Starwood, Aspen

Offered at $29,990,000

Get the Floor Plans

In Pitkin County the first 5,750 square feet is exempt. Everything above it, up to a hard ceiling of 9,250, has to be won in the county's growth competition or covered with a development right, a TDR, at 2,500 square feet apiece.

That ceiling used to be 15,000. The county cut it in November 2023.

The price of that right has roughly tripled in six years. Today one sells for about $650,000 to $775,000 on the Aspen MLS, and only a handful are listed for sale right now.

With the county already talking about requiring more of them as houses get bigger, don't count on them getting cheaper.

Then there is the county's employee housing fee, paid before your permit issues. On larger second homes, the county's own calculator puts it at more than a million dollars.

Here's what most people don't want to hear. Budget at least $3,000 a foot, all in. That is my number, and I would not plan on less. You can always go with the contractor who quotes you $2,500 a foot. Then get ready for the change orders, right when you're knee deep in construction, and watch it climb toward $4,000 a foot.

542 Carroll Drive is 7,223 square feet, main house and guest house together. Build that today at $3,000 a foot and the house alone is about $22 million.

Yes, a new house could go bigger, up to 9,250 square feet. But the county isn't handing out those extra 2,000 feet for free. It takes another development right, at $650,000 to $775,000, when you can find one.

Then the county's building permit fee: 2.7% of the construction cost. At $3,000 a foot, that's about $585,000, paid before a shovel goes in the ground.

Want to see the website?

Offered at $29,990,000

Visit 542Carroll.com

None of the county's clock starts until the architect has done the real work. Concept design. Schematic design. Then construction documents and the permit set, with the engineers and surveyors working alongside. Months of it, before the county sees a single page. And you and your family have to make fast decisions and manage not to change your minds.

Then the county's own permit records tell the story. Land-use approval takes a median of about eight and a half months. Then the building permit, from application to issue, about ten and a half months more.

And since 2025 a new house over 5,750 square feet has to be designed to an energy rating of zero once its solar is counted, with a battery required. Since May 2026 it has to meet Colorado's new wildfire code.

You still want to ski at Christmas.

A comparable house for rent in Starwood, McLain Flats, Red Mountain or the West End is listed on the Aspen MLS today at $12,000 to $15,000 a night over the holidays, and $6,200 to $10,000 a night in ski season and summer.

Christmas week, two ski weeks and two summer weeks a year, for four years: about $1.1 million to $1.6 million in rent, lodging tax included. To visit a construction site. Now, let's mention, but not delve too deep into, the contractor you select and the actual build process.

Let me tell you how fast systems move.

On my last trip out to Aspen, I left my laptop on the plane during my layover in Denver. I had an hour and a half. It took me about 45 minutes, and a Chick-fil-A, to notice.

I went to my new gate and talked to the agents. I went back to the gate I arrived at and talked to those agents. I talked to the supervisor. I called United and found out the plane was still sitting in Denver and wasn't leaving until the next day. I talked to the United supervisor on shift. I talked to the supervisor of the cleaning crew. I missed my flight.

I filled out the online lost-item forms for both United and the Denver airport and started to wonder if I would ever see that laptop again.

I flew to Aspen. I stayed in Aspen. I flew back to Denver, then home to Miami. I had a birthday party. I closed a rental and put a property under contract. My laptop was still somewhere in Denver. I called United every day. I called the Denver airport every day, for two weeks.

Finally I saw my Google account signed in on that laptop, and before I knew it I was paying the shipping fee to get it back.

Something one person could have found in ten minutes, the moment I lost it, took three weeks, a new laptop and a few years off my life.

That was one laptop and one airline. Good luck with the building process in Aspen.

Put it together on the cheapest lot in Starwood: land, one development right, 7,223 square feet at $3,000 a foot, and four years of tax, dues and rent.

About $30 million. On the next lot up, at $7 million, about $32 million.

And you move in around 2030, on two to four and a half acres.

542 Carroll Drive is 38.24 acres in Starwood, and it's done.

$29,990,000.

Same money. Nearly nine times the land. And definitely higher up and more private than all those available lots.

Here's the part nobody says out loud. Most people who build up here are trying to end up with exactly this. Charred cedar and walls of glass. A main house and a separate guest house, both looking at the Elk Mountains. A floating oak stair, a sauna and a cold plunge set to the open peaks, a private trail through the aspens. Already designed, already approved, already built.

Build it: 3 years minimum, 4 realistic. And a lot of Advil.

And the clock is already ticking on you. Last week the county approved a new comprehensive plan that points toward smaller houses. Its implementation list, which the county calls informational, includes tighter size limits. Those are ideas, not law. But you know which way they point.

Aspen has been here before. In 1893 the price of silver collapsed. That November Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and a booming silver town began a long decline. Three years later William Jennings Bryan stood up in Chicago and told the country, "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." He was talking about silver, and towns like Aspen. He lost. By 1930 Aspen was down to about 700 people.

I have been showing 542 Carroll Drive since I put it on the market, and the buyers' brokers keep telling me the same thing. Their clients are also looking at land simultaneously. I guess they want to see what a finished house looks like before they go build one.

I get it. But I like my turkey carved and on the plate. I don't care to reach in for the gizzards and stuff it myself.

If you are looking at Starwood, you are already in the know. Going for a new build on smaller acreage can be seen as ambitious. To me it seems masochistic.

And I have heard it all before. Starwood is too remote. What's next? The view is just too perfect? There is too much wall space to fill with art? I need a real reason. Or better yet, a real buyer. Bryan said, "The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error."

Buy 542 Carroll Drive and you can be in it in two weeks. Your biggest headache will be which TV to pick, or which Kluft.

Aspen Snowmass opens November 26. You could be skiing from here by Thanksgiving.

Bryan closed his speech with a sentence that set off 25 minutes of pandemonium in the hall. I'll borrow the shape of it. Do not press down upon your own brow this crown of permits. Do not spend the next four winters in Aspen renting somebody else's house.

542 Carroll Drive

Offered at $29,990,000

Get the Floor Plans

If you have built in Pitkin County, or thought about it, hit reply and tell me how long it really took.

And if you are looking at Starwood, Aspen homes for sale, or weighing a lot against a finished house, I would welcome the conversation. I will walk you through the numbers on both sides.

— David Hunt Solomon