The industrialist Walter Paepcke is best known for founding the Aspen Institute with his wife Elizabeth in 1949. They developed the downtown through the Aspen Skiing Co., and were largely responsible for putting the former mining town on the map.
But the family’s time in the area was also occupied with more bucolic pursuits. “My mother loved nature and wildlife and flowers,” says Paepcke’s daughter, Paula Zurcher, now 90. “We all hiked all over the mountains.”
On one such idyll, the family stumbled across the 400-acre Erickson Ranch, just a 10-minute drive from downtown Aspen, and promptly bought it.
They kept the property intact until Paepcke died in 1960, at which point Elizabeth sold off about 100 acres. The family kept the rest of it for an additional 30 years until Elizabeth died in 1994.
Then her heirs began to subdivide the property in earnest.
One of Zurcher’s sisters sold 100 acres to Leslie Wexner, the founder and chairman of L Brands Inc, says Zurcher. The remaining 200 acres were parceled out into even smaller lots. Zurcher kept two. On one, she commissioned architect Harry Teague to build a 6,800-square-foot contemporary house with seven bedrooms and five full baths in 2000. It took two years to build.
It had only been intended as a vacation home—Zurcher lived in the Bay Area—but she ended up moving in full-time to the house in 2004. Now, 19 years after building the house and more than 70 years after her father first bought the land, Zurcher is parting ways with the property, listing it with Christie’s International Real Estate’s Aspen brokerage for $17.95 million.
One of Aspen's founding families is selling its mountainside mansion https://t.co/J7L2kS87rg
— Bloomberg Pursuits (@luxury) March 22, 2019
The Land
This section of the original property is parceled out in four lots, all of which are now developed. Those lots, in turn, are shoehorned around a 50-acre plot of open land, in which all the lots share ownership. That land, in turn, is preserved as a sort of buffer, keeping the houses secluded and their views pristine.
As a result, even though Zurcher’s house sits on about 12 acres at the base of Red Mountain, it has the feeling of being much more remote. “I chose the lot so that it was far removed from the road,” Zurcher says. “I didn’t want to see any traffic.”