www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/us/02aspen.html
Enlarge This Image Michael Brands for The New York Times Joshua Saslove, a real estate broker, at the indoor swimming pool at Hala Ranch. The home was built for Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia. His companys premier listing, called Hala Ranch, is a 95-acre estate built in 1991 for the family of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former ambassador to the United States from Saudi Arabia and the homes only (occasional) occupant. At $135 million, Hala, just northwest of downtown Aspen, is the most expensive single-family residential property in the nation on the market, Mr Saslove said. Mr Saslove has received about 1,000 requests to tour the home since last October when it went on sale, and he, along with lawyers for the prince who review every call, have granted just 11 of them. This is what high-mountain hideaway money in Aspen has come down to: Even the ordinary rich can no longer press their noses to the glass. In the marketing of Hala, which means Welcome in Arabic, nonbillionaires need not apply. Hala will almost certainly, Mr Saslove believes, be a new owners second, third or fourth home. Money on that scale does not just stumble in off the street. There are 946 billionaires, according to this years tally by Forbes magazine, keeping Mr Sasloves list of potential buyers relatively short. He and Halas property manager, Martha Grimes, 57, who came to Aspen right after college, saw the place at its zenith, or others might say its nadir, as elements of the old hippie counterculture and Hollywood celebrity style melded. Ms Grimes worked as a waitress and later a horse wrangler on the very ranch land that later became Hala. I remember this hill, this very hill, because I used to ride my horse through here, she said as she led a tour through the house for a reporter and a photographer on a recent afternoon.
National Security Council and is not spending as much time in the United States as he once did, helped establish Aspens newer style, which is much more about family, culture and art and wealth that even Hollywood stars cannot match. I dont see as much braggadocio as I used to, said Mr Saslove, a gruff 66-year-old with longish hair and a nonstop Blackberry. In his 22 years as Saudi Arabias ambassador to the United States, a tenure that ended in 2005, Prince Bandar was a powerful ally to a succession of presidents. Most recently, however, British media accounts have said that a major British arms contractor paid more than $2 billion clandestinely into bank accounts in Washington controlled by Prince Bandar. At 56,000 square feet, Hala is bigger than the White House, with a staff of 12. It has 15 bedrooms, 16 baths, a private barbershop and beauty salon just off the master suite and enough space for a party of 450 people. Many of the rooms are huge, with banks of windows overlooking the Aspen valley and the mountains beyond. There are few proclamations of grandiosity beyond the occasional artwork, like the Albert Bierstadt painting that hangs over the main fireplace. It is not a house for a family that putters in the kitchen, which is in the basement, the province of professional chefs with its stainless-steel everything and rows of hanging pots. Housekeepers were ironing the sheets in the nearby laundry, feeding them through a giant pressing machine. Aspen certainly still has its glossy celebrities, of a sort. One of Prince Bandars nearest neighbors, for example, is Barbi Benton, the former Playboy playmate and actress who starred in B-movies like Hospital Massacre and The Deathstalker in the early 1980s. But the rising costs are rapidly squeezing out mere wealth. Mr Saslove, whose company, Joshua & Company, is an affiliate of Great Estates, the real estate arm of Christies auction house, said homes that cost about a million dollars in the 1970s now might sell for nine times that. So far, through coincidence or not, Mr Saslove said, a majority of the serious shoppers for Hala have come from old money, fortunes gained at least a generation ago. He is not sure why, and of course, he would not say who. There are a lot of stories that go along with it, he said, but in the interest of privacy and confidentially, I cant talk about it.
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