The Mesa Above Aspen Where Billionaires Go to Be Left Alone

It began as a potato farm.

In 1962, Edgar B. Stern Jr. — who would go on to found the Deer Valley ski resort in Utah — bought a 960-acre potato-and-cattle ranch on a mesa above Aspen for $360,000. He divided it into more than a hundred parcels and named it Starwood. Stern had found a diamond in the rough; he just had to be patient. Starwood would become one of Aspen's most sought-after addresses for billionaires and celebrities — maximum privacy, oversized lots, and the Colorado Rockies filling every window.

Today, Starwood is a 960-acre gated community: more than 100 estates, each on its own multi-acre lot, spread across a shelf of land 8,700 feet up. A private sanctuary, close enough to the action of Aspen.

Over sixty years, the mountain quietly filled with people who could live anywhere and chose to live up here, unbothered. John Denver, early on. Later, a Saudi prince's estate, oil money, corporate heirs, and entrepreneurs. Most of them bought through nameless companies — up here that's not suspicious, it's just discretion — and the $7,500 lots Stern slowly sold now trade for tens of millions.

What sells it isn't marble or square footage. It's the Colorado the rest of us only get on vacation, made permanent — thin, clean air; a quiet that almost has a texture to it; wildflower meadows in July; ten thousand aspens turning gold in September; elk crossing the grass at first light. An oasis with a guardhouse — the kind of stillness you can't manufacture, waiting for you every single morning.

If you ever read Car and Driver or PC Magazine, you read William Ziff Jr. — he published both. He built Ziff-Davis into a magazine empire and sold it in 1994 for $1.4 billion. Ziff bought several lots in Starwood, including 74 acres at the very top that he platted in 1992 and split into exactly two: Lot 1 (about 35 acres) and Lot 2 (about 38 acres).

He passed in 2006. Starting in 2017, his family began selling off its real estate. Then, in 2022, one anonymous buyer took it all in a single deal — founder Edgar Stern's own ground and the Ziffs' Lot 1, the other half of the publisher's estate, assembled into one compound. About 116 acres for a reported $39 million. Stern's ground and half the publisher's estate, gone to one buyer in an afternoon.

Which leaves Lot 2 — 542 Carroll Drive, one of the largest lots in all of Starwood. The last remaining half of Ziff's own estate, and the only half a buyer can still own. The current owners — who, in the Starwood tradition, prefer to stay unnamed — built it from the ground up: the main house in 2020, the guest house in 2023. I'm the one selling it, at $29,990,000. My name is David Hunt Solomon, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Colorado Properties. Here's what 38 acres of that mountain feels like.

The setting. You sit roughly 600 feet above the valley floor — a 60-story tower over downtown Aspen — on a mesa at 8,700 feet; stack five Empire State Buildings and you're standing at the front door. All four of Aspen's ski mountains and the whole Elk Range are your daily view. And when the sun drops behind the peaks and the town goes cold and dark below, the mesa holds the light — the last gold of the evening, every single day. Where the scarcest luxury is daylight, you'd own the high ground.

The land. Thirty-eight acres — call it 29 football fields — that live like your own private preserve. Wildflowers to the treeline in summer, ten thousand aspens on fire with gold in fall, snow and total silence in winter. Elk through the meadow at first light, deer in the aspens, birdsong everywhere, and the occasional bear ambling through like he owns the place. The Shadyside trail starts at the foot of your driveway: you don't drive to the mountain, you step onto it.

The house. Six bedrooms, seven and a half baths, 7,223 square feet across the two buildings — charred Japanese wood outside; inside, a Boffi kitchen, European oak floors, gallery-white walls made for an art collection, every pane of glass aimed at the range. It has a heated three-car garage, and the home makes some of its own power off rooftop solar.

The wellness wing. The ground floor of the guest house is a full gym with a sauna, a cold plunge, and a hot tub — all of it pointed straight at the mountains. Work out, plunge, breathe, stretch — and never leave the property. Find me a wellness center with a better view.

The peace. This is the part you can't photograph. Clean air, deep quiet, and a guarded gate between you and the rest of the world. Starwood has been the valley's most private address for half a century, with its own firehouse and a staffed gate around the clock. John Denver wrote "Starwood in Aspen" about his home on Johnson Drive, inside this same gate. People didn't come for the song, they came for the "sweet Rocky Mountain paradise."

542 Carroll Drive · Starwood, Aspen

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