Aspen's snazziest subdivision of multimillion dollar celebrity homes is a 1,000-acre enclave with an armed guard at the gate. Design standards required buried utilities and construction in materials and colors intended to match the semiarid terrain on the flank of Red Mountain. Approximately eighty homes, most hidden from their neighbors and many designed by notable architects, have been built over several decades. Lots alone sell for at least $1 million.
Bart Prince's 1992 house for Barbi Benton, the Playboy magazine celebrity, is a neo-Wrightian, organic composition of four pods crawling down a slope, with a dining room for 300 guests. Ted Conover, in Whiteout: Lost in Aspen (1991), takes readers to the 1980s home of Ritz-Carlton Hotel developer Mohammed Hadid:
Even in Aspen, $6 million buys a lot of house. It was a rectilinear mass of glass and stone, with four floors that sort of stepped down the steep mountain-side and full-length balconies overlooking the valley.… A certain hardness still prevailed, enforced by all the glass, the many gold-plated fixtures and, especially, the marble floor. A creamy alabaster shade, it extended the length of the ground floor and was polished to a high luster. So solid and expansive was the floor that one could imagine it a natural outcropping from the mountain, responsible for the siting of the house, which had been blasted, chipped, planed, and polished down to its present perfect horizontal flatness.