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I Toured America’s Priciest Home for Sale
The $300 million estate built by billionaires from California includes a 18,466-sq-foot main house, a wellness spa and a lake fully stocked with trout and carp.
ASPEN, COLO.—It was a hot August morning when I visited the mansion, but in the great room—a vast entertaining space with 30-foot-high ceilings—there were roaring blazes in the towering stone fireplaces at either end. The billionaire owners of the roughly 18,500-square-foot house, Lynda and Stewart Resnick, weren’t in town, but Lynda had carefully choreographed my visit, giving instructions as to how I should be led through the house for the most dramatic effect.
We crossed the great room and walked through french doors onto a heated patio overlooking the 74-acre property. From there, the epic vista of the Continental Divide stretched out in front of me. I could see the outlines of distant paragliders swooping over Aspen Mountain. An infinity pool appeared to empty into the estate’s private lake, where a swan-shaped paddle boat sat by a small dock.
When the Resnicks first saw this parcel of land in the early 1990s, it felt transcendent. “You were looking at God,” Lynda had told me by a Zoom from her primary home, a lavish Beaux‑Arts mansion in Beverly Hills, Calif. “You thought, ‘Am I really allowed to have this?’”
Three decades later, the Resnicks are looking to sell their Aspen home for $300 million, making it the priciest in the nation. If it fetches its asking price, it would be the most expensive home ever sold in the U.S.
Known as Little Lake Lodge, the estate comes with several houses for guests and staff in addition to the main residence. The Resnicks, who spend summers and holidays in Aspen, declined to say how much it cost to buy the land or build the estate.
Much of Little Lake Lodge’s value comes from its size and location about a mile from downtown Aspen, one of the country’s priciest real-estate markets, said listing agent Mandy Welgos of Aspen Snowmass Sotheby’s International Realty, one of my tour guides for the day. Having such vast acreage near the center of town is unheard of, she said, calling the property “a unicorn.”
With an estimated net worth of around $14 billion, the Resnicks are the founders of the Wonderful Company, which encompasses brands such as Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice, Fiji Water and Wonderful Halos mandarins. They are also philanthropists and major political donors, primarily to Democrats. Stewart, 88, and Lynda, 82, have been married over 50 years and together share five children from previous relationships.
Hooked from the start
Little Lake Lodge is Lynda’s baby. A force of nature with a meticulously styled brunette bob, Lynda ran her own marketing agency before going into business with her husband. The Resnicks started coming to Aspen because she developed an interest in fly-fishing in the late 1980s, after a visit to the Jackson Hole, Wyo., home of the actor Harrison Ford.
“As we pulled up to Harrison’s home, he ran out of his front door screaming like a lunatic, ‘They are rising!’” she recalled in a book about Little Lake Lodge she commissioned. To her surprise, her friend Skip Brittenham quickly dropped his pants as he rushed to get ready for fishing with Ford.
“I thought, if grown men can get so excited about fishing that they drop their drawers and stand in freezing water to cast their lines,” Lynda wrote, “maybe there is something to this.”
The Resnicks started visiting Aspen in the summers so Lynda could try fly-fishing herself; she also practiced casting in the swimming pool of their Beverly Hills mansion.
They liked Aspen, which Lynda described as “camp for grown-up rich people.” In the early 1990s, they bought the land that became Little Lake Lodge.
To build a house on the property, the Resnicks tapped architect Peter Dominick, whose designs included the Grand Californian Hotel & Spa at Disneyland in California. For inspiration, Lynda looked at books on the rustic architecture created for the National Park Service in the 1920s and 1930s. She also visited the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park for ideas.
The exterior facade would include materials indigenous to the land, Lynda said, adding that she wanted the house to fade into the environment. “Blink,” she said, “and it disappears.”
There were disagreements. Dominick wanted a red slate roof and a red and buff sandstone exterior. Lynda thought that would look too conspicuous in the environment and envisioned a dark-green slate roof and gray sandstone. She, of course, triumphed.
Lynda reveled in the building process, she said, but Stewart didn’t enjoy it. He didn’t understand why the construction crew would take off for the ski slopes on powdery snow days, for example, or why costs kept going up. She eventually banned him from the site, believing that his “sour” attitude was bringing down morale on the jobsite.
The house was completed in September 1996 and he was delighted with the result, she said.
A look inside
Despite the home’s vast size, it isn’t cold or museum-like. Instead, it feels lived in, packed with trinkets and souvenirs from the couple’s life and travels. In a reptile-themed bathroom, frogs, snakes and other critters appear on the tiles. Another bathroom holds a collection of rubber duckies. A logo Lynda made for the house—depicting three of the property’s Ponderosa pines—is emblazoned on linens and towels. All the furnishings, both antique and custom made, are included in the sale.
The primary suite, larger than most New York apartments, was specifically designed around the lake and mountain views. It has a private office for Lynda, his-and-hers bathrooms and closets, and a black and gold fireplace.
In recent years, the Resnicks installed an oxygen system in the primary suite to counteract the altitude. Thanks to the system, Lynda said, “you wake up in the morning and you could jump over Aspen mountain, you have so much energy.”
The property also includes a wellness spa with a hot tub, a cold plunge and a steam room. In a log cabin-style guest wing off the spa, each of the four bedrooms has a name: Meadows, Roaring Fork, North Star and Buckaroo.
Lynda has thrown plenty of parties at Little Lake Lodge over the years, with attendees including Diane Keaton, Barbra Streisand and the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To make hosting easier, the Resnicks have a computer program that lists their collections of linens, dishes, glassware and silver, down to the napkin rings and salt cellars.
As she drove me around the lake in a golf cart, Welgos pointed out marked trails for walks and cross-country skiing. The lake is fully stocked with trout and carp, Lynda said, but she hasn’t fished it because those fish feel like family pets. The swan boat was her idea, thinking it would be fun for the grandkids.
The property also contains several other houses, including a roughly 5,300-square-foot home on the banks of the Roaring Fork River that was constructed in 2014. There are also permits in place for a 19,500-square-foot-residence on a separate parcel; that adds significantly to the property’s value, Welgos said, because it is far larger than what can be built in Aspen today.
The Resnicks are selling Little Lake Lodge because they recently built a home near Santa Barbara, Calif., and maintaining three properties is “just too hard,” Lynda said, especially since they are both active in business and philanthropy.
A ROARING ASPEN MARKET
Aspen’s luxury housing market has escalated sharply in recent years, fueled by limited supply and sustained demand from ultrawealthy buyers. Sales in the $50 million to $100 million range are now a regular occurrence. Private jets line up en masse at the tiny local airport.
Local real-estate agents agree there is immense value in the property’s acreage, though some said the headline-grabbing $300 million asking price might be slightly ambitious.
The record for a U.S. home sale was set in 2019, when hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin paid about $240 million purchase for a condo in Manhattan. Other than Little Lake Lodge, the most expensive home on the market in the U.S. is a yet-to-be built mansion in Florida’s Palm Beach County asking $285 million. In Aspen, the highest-priced residential home sale to date was Steve Wynn and Thomas Peterffy’s $108 million purchase last year.
Write to Katherine Clarke at Katherine.Clarke@wsj.com
