Melanie Griffith explains why you should buy her Aspen mansion

It took actress Melanie Griffith “about six years” to get her then-husband Antonio Banderas to try skiing in Aspen, she says, “but the minute he tried it, he liked it so much he was like, ‘Go find us a house’.”

Griffith began touring various residences starting in 2002, but says, “I just wanted to spend US$5 million or less, and every house I looked at was US$10 million or US$12 million, and they were huge or crazy and not our style.”

Finally, she visited a rambling, 7,390 sq ft, log cabin-style house surrounded by aspen trees overlooking Five Fingers bowl. “You don’t see anything except wilderness” she says. “It’s on a peak at 10,000 feet [above sea level], it’s just extraordinary.” Griffith bought the house for about US$3.8 million in what she says was late 2002 or early 2003, and moved in.

Twelve years later, in 2015, Griffith listed the home, along with a compound that included a guest house, historic cabin, and significantly more acreage, for US$9.9 million. After reducing the price by US$1 million, in 2017 she split the property up and sold the guest house and historic cabin for US$2.24 million, and then listed the main house, which sits on two acres, for US$6.37 million. 

This month, Griffith relisted the house for US$4.8 million with Carrie Wells at Coldwell Banker Mason Morse Real Estate. 

“My kids are grown, and I got divorced,” she says. “I don’t go up there that much any more, and it’s such a family home.”

Inside the house