A home near Telluride, Colorado, seems to almost blend into the mountain it’s built on, in part because its exterior walls are made of stone excavated right on the house site.
Even though many houses in this ski haven are located well off the beaten path, most homebuilders have all their materials brought in instead of using what's on site. The company that built the property at 680 Hawn Lane, about 10 miles from the town of Telluride, took a different approach, according to Rick Fusting, the agent with LIV Sotheby’s International Realty who listed the home for $18.5 million.
“There’s no other home in Telluride where this was done,” Fusting said in an interview. “It’s not like if you order it from the rock company and it shows up already chiseled and they just stack it in. This was much more labor-intensive to dig the hole, pull out all the rock, chip it up so it looks really cool and put it all around the house.”
Fusting estimates that to construct the 10,000-square-foot house the same way as it was in 2008 would cost at least $23 million today. The builder sold it to the current owner for $13 million in 2012, according to the Telluride Association of Realtors.
The house on Hawn Lane sits at the base of Hawn Mountain. RKD Architects Inc. designed the home with the local stone and curved wooden roof to blend into the mountain, according to the Colorado-based firm's website.
The house is divided into “pods” with the kitchen, dining and living room areas in the central space and bedrooms in adjacent sections. The bedrooms are separated from the central space by indoor walkways, one of which passes over a small outdoor pond to the primary bedroom.
“The nice thing about the pods is it provides a lot of privacy for guests or family,” said Fusting.
The lot the house sits on includes 35 acres that provides another layer of privacy. The property is part of a subdivision that designates house sites so homes aren’t too close to each other.
The floor-to-ceiling windows in much of the house provides dramatic views of the San Juan Mountains, some of which top 14,000 feet above sea level.
Another of the house’s attractions is its proximity to hiking trails. A path built by the subdivision homeowners association runs up the mountain about a mile to an altitude beyond the tree line. The path was made by stacking scree, or broken rock fragments, to form steps up the slope, Fusting said. Residents can also easily reach publicly accessible trails in nearby Uncompahgre National Forest.
The homeowners association provides access to a number of additional shared amenities, including an outdoor winter ice rink and tennis and pickleball courts.
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“The big thing is it’s adjacent to the national forest, which out West is always important because you can walk out of your home and walk for hundreds of miles,” Fusting said.
The house’s next owner will likely use it as a second home, something that is common in the Telluride area, Fusting said. He added that they’ll probably keep it for a long time, just as the current owner has.
“To build a house in Telluride takes three years — for this house probably four, just because we’re so remote,” he said. “The town’s surrounded by national forest and you can’t build there, that’s why workers have to drive an hour and a half to get here. It keeps inventory thin, and most people after they put that much time into building a home, they don’t want to sell it," Fusting said.