At a moment when mortgage rates are dragging the market down, agents still report that homes with standalone settings and that are move-in ready can sell quickly and draw multiple offers. That’s true even in the tiptop price range, where broker Katie Hoster with LIV Sotheby’s International put a home up last week that at $10.75 million is now the priciest in the city of Denver.
Tudor revival style
Mason Lewis was a Denver lawyer who in 1913 founded a tax law firm following the adoption of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, allowing the federal government to levy an income tax. In 1930, he commissioned architect Henry A. Koch to build a Tudor revival styled home, over 10,000 square feet, with premium architectural detailing for an authentic look.
The timing was daring — a year after the 1929 stock market crash. Historians note that Denver was slow to slip into the miasma following the October crash, possibly feeling padded by distance from what was happening back east. The Country Club neighborhood, where Mayor Robert Speer (he died in 1918) and many of the town’s notables lived, had been launched in 1905; and two decades later as the cataclysm approached was getting into its best sites — marketed then as Park Lane Square.
The rarity of 575 Circle Drive starts with a three-quarter-acre size. “From the backyard it’s one of the most private lots in all of Denver,” Hoster said, adding that the mature treescape adds even more seclusion to a home with no neighbor in back. It’s a location, she adds, that has only grown more valuable over recent decades — a four-block walk to Hillstone and other taverns lining Cherry Creek’s restaurant row.
With that space to work with, the home shows a ballroom-sized salon with a huge gas fireplace on the main level and a second level with five en suite bedrooms, plus a nanny suite on a third level where a balcony overlooks the yard. The basement already had a gas fireplace, massage room, steam bath and a big wine cellar when a later owner repurposed one of four garage bays into a more state-of-the-art wine cellar, this one with temperature control…