For $22 Million, Live Your Tuscan Fantasy ... in Vail, Colo.
A mountaintop aerie is on the market.
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Dick Rothkopf and his family spent every summer in Vail, Colo. One summer in the late 1990s, they noticed that one of their favorite hiking trails had been staked out for development. Rothkopf, an entrepreneur who brought Thomas the Tank Engine to America, called the property’s developer to investigate. He was informed that the land, comprising more than 200 acres, was going to be chopped up into 44 residential parcels. “We were sort of dumbfounded but we figured, ‘OK, that’s the way of progress,'” Rothkopf said.
In a rare victory, Nature triumphed—if only briefly—over Progress: It turned out that the road the developer needed to build “was, from an engineering point of view, infeasible,” Rothkopf said. The mountain was too steep.