Swan's Nest
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Ben Stanley Revett House (Swan's Nest)
1898, Ben Stanley Revett. 50 Summit County 315, 4 miles north of Breckenridge on Colorado 9, then 1 mile east
On the Swan River, which his firm was dredging for gold, Ben Stanley Revett, a graduate of the Royal School of Mines in London, built an expansive frame house befitting his flamboyant lifestyle and immense girth. Swan's Nest has extra-wide doors, a grand entry hall, four family bedrooms, quarters for his Japanese gardener and Filipino house servants, two indoor bathrooms, and a billiard room. His frame “nest” consists of a central section under steep-pitched roofs with five dormers above the broad central veranda, flanked by two-story wings.
Finding stones for the massive fireplace was no problem: the view from the veranda across the now defunct croquet and tennis courts ends in massive rock piles left by Revett's dredge boat operations. After Revett and his gold boats disappeared, the house sat vacant and vandalized, once selling for $466 in back taxes before its 1978 restoration as a resort.
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