Aspen Privé Properties · 001 Mountain Valley
190 W Lupine Drive
The Right Kind of Big
The house sits inside its own stand of aspen and conifer, with forested hillside behind it. Just over a third of an acre, a mile east of downtown.
Photograph courtesy CompassThe Approach
I stood outside for half an hour before going in. What I heard was wind moving through the trees and a bird I never located. A woman walked a dog past the end of the driveway. That was the traffic.
190 W Lupine Drive is in Mountain Valley, roughly a mile east of downtown Aspen. Gondola Plaza is six minutes by car. Thirteen by bus. Seven on a bike. Under half an hour on foot, uphill on the way home.
What brought me here was not the quiet. It was a number.
Price per square foot
$2,741
190 W Lupine Drive
$3,745
Comparable set average
Ten comparable Aspen listings, roughly $10M to $19M, actively marketed August 2026. Square footage as marketed. Within that set, 190 W Lupine is the largest house by around thirteen hundred square feet, and the second lowest priced per foot.
Walking through the house did not produce a simple explanation for the gap. What it produced was a different question, which is why the house is here.
Stone, reclaimed timber, and glass along the full terrace side. Generous without being cavernous, which is a harder balance than it sounds.
Photograph courtesy CompassPlaces to Be
Large houses tend to collapse a distinction this one keeps: the difference between a room big enough for everyone and a room where anyone actually wants to sit.
The kitchen has a substantial island and, in the corner, a small table. Not the one you set for guests. The formal table is a separate proposition, larger, under a chandelier, connected to the living room rather than sequestered from it.
There are four fireplaces. In listing copy that reads as accumulation. Standing in the rooms it reads as strategy. Warmth at this footprint is a design problem, and someone solved it deliberately.
Off the living room, slightly set apart, there is a small room with a desk and a window showing almost nothing but trees. In a house this size, the decision to make a small room is more revealing than the decision to make a large one.
The formal table sits under the chandelier, open to the kitchen rather than closed off from it.
Photograph courtesy Compass
Between the middle and upper levels.
Photograph by Paul MontielThe Window
One of the best architectural moments in the house is a window, and it is not in any of the rooms you would expect.
Moving between floors you pass a wall of glass filled almost entirely with trees, the mountain sitting behind them. It turns circulation, the part of a house you are supposed to move through without noticing, into the part you stop in.
The effect accumulates elsewhere too. Trees arrive from the living room, from the primary bedroom, through the staircases, out the small window by the desk. You are never told you are surrounded by them. You just keep being shown it, from a different angle each time.
This is the thing photographs cannot carry.
Two ensuite bedrooms, a full laundry, and this room. The artwork is film stills, which explains the space faster than a floor plan would.
Photograph courtesy CompassDownstairs Is a Floor
On paper, 1,482 of the 5,470 square feet sit below grade. Twenty-seven per cent. It is the kind of number that makes a careful reader discount the total before seeing anything.
Two bedrooms are down here, each with its own bathroom, its own closet, a queen bed, a television, and real daylight. Not the apologetic light of a window well. The living area is built around a sofa that would seat eight adults without anyone perching, facing a screen scaled to match. A full laundry room with a utility sink finishes it.
The ceilings are high enough that the word basement never surfaced while I was down there. That is the whole test.
The primary suite sits on the main level, which in a three-storey house is a structural decision rather than a convenience.
Photograph courtesy CompassThe Suite
The bedroom looks out through trees toward the mountain. Immediately on entering there is a sitting corner with its own sofa, somewhere to be awake in the room without the bed serving as the only furniture. A private terrace connects down to the main terrace below the living room, so the suite can be separate or part of the house depending on which door you use.
The bathroom carries the same weight: substantial marble, a glass-enclosed shower, a deep jetted tub, the toilet given its own room. The views persist in there too.
The closet is large enough to read as a room rather than as storage, and there is a washer and dryer inside it. That is the detail I keep returning to. It is not glamorous. It is evidence that somebody thought about what a Tuesday morning in this house actually involves.
The main level opens outward along its whole length rather than through a single door.
Photograph courtesy CompassThe Ground
Just over a third of an acre, which in Aspen is neither large nor apologetic. The more interesting fact is how much of it is in play.
From beside the garage, a small path climbs toward the terrace. It is a modest thing and it changes the character of the exterior considerably. The outside of the house is circulated rather than merely landscaped. You move around the property rather than parking on it.
There are neighbouring houses. This is a residential part of Aspen and it does not pretend otherwise. But the trees do most of the work of deciding what you look at, and what you look at is mostly trees.
The size is not the achievement.The use of it is.
The Property
190 W Lupine Drive · Aspen, Colorado 81611
- Price
- $14,995,000
- Interior
- 5,470 sq ft
- Per square foot
- $2,741
- Below grade
- 1,482 sq ft
- Land
- 0.37 acres
- Levels
- Three
- Bedrooms
- 5
- Bathrooms
- 5 full, 2 half
- Fireplaces
- 4
- Built
- 2007, renovated 2022
- Neighbourhood
- Mountain Valley
- MLS
- 191211
Listed by
Doug Leibinger
Compass Aspen
Aspen-based broker specializing in luxury residential real estate. All inquiries about this property go to him.
doug@compass.com (970) 379-9045 View the listing MLS 191211
With thanks
To Ashley Efraim and Doug Leibinger at Compass Aspen, for their generosity with time and access throughout. Ashley in particular made every part of it easy, from the first conversation to the afternoon I spent walking through the house.
Aspen Privé Properties · 001
Words
Paul Montiel
Photography
Compass Aspen
Plates 02, 05 by Paul Montiel
Published
Aspen, Colorado
August 2026
Set in
Cormorant Garamond
One property at a time. Each with a reason to be here.
paul@aspenprive.com