The West End Historic District, Aspen, Colorado Mid-Century Modern Homes

The West End is admittedly my favorite neighborhood in all of Aspen and where we ultimately want to end up someday :)

The West End of Aspen originally started being developed during the late 1800s during the silver mining boom, hence why there are so many historic homes such as the highly coveted Victorian homes. During the mid-century era, there was another boom as the town became a ski town, and Aspen needed additional housing for the workers in the area, as well as for those who worked at the Aspen Institute nearby. Enter - panabodes, the easy affordable housing solution to be able to house many people in one structure. These panabodes sometimes were originally built in the form of log cabins with low pitched rooflines, with very few windows. They were long and skinny in nature, and the panabodes were always accompanied by a line of Blue Spruce trees in front of them for additional shade and privacy. These panabodes still exist today on some parcels. Some have been scraped. As a part of the Aspen Modern program, there are homeowner incentives for buyers of a parcel with a panabode on it, to keep the original structure intact there. However, due to the desire to maximize square footage to the lot lines, and build giant homes in the West End that are completely new, modern, and luxurious, sometimes the mid-century moderns and panabodes simply get scraped. I personally would love to see these homes kept on the properties, and for architects to come in and either restore them, or make them much more contemporary, which is popular with many people. I do want to see the City of Aspen care a bit more about historic preservation when it comes to the gem mid-century modern homes in the West End, because they are super special.

There are many architects who worked on the mid-century modern homes in the West End, but most notably Herbert Bayer worked on a few of them, as well as Fritz Benedict, Ted Mullarz, Ellie Brickham (circa the 1980s), and other modernist architects in Aspen throughout the decades. The history is rich in this neighborhood. There are also two special mid-century modern homes on Lake Avenue with gorgeous views of the lake from the back of their properties. Bayer designed a few of these homes to have white peaked roofs, to emulate the look of snow on top of the roof year round.