Robert Levine, who founded Cabletron and was one of the tech giants to emerge in the 1990s, just listed his custom Colorado mansion for $44.2 million.
The 50,000-square-foot mega mansion, which Levine built after retiring from tech in 1997, was designed with the tech mogul’s unique style in mind, according to the New York Post. Levine had a habit of wearing ostrich-skin boots and once used an armored tank to chase away a pizza delivery worker. Along with eight bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, the estate boasts an ice cream parlor, guest suites modeled after the Wild West and a suite that looks like a jail.
The house itself is a stylish mansion full of glass and stone. A 200-foot steel bridge overlooking the Rocky Mountains’ Sawatch mountain range leads out of the property and into the forest. While Vail has some of the highest land prices in the country, Levine’s property is as spacious as they come, boasting 250 acres of land bordering a national forest that includes a trout pond, a playground and trails for hiking in the summer and snowmobiling in the winter. Barbara Scrivens and Malia Nobrega of LIV Sotheby’s International Realty are the listing agents for the estate.
“While only half an hour to Vail Mountain (east) or to the Eagle County Airports (west), the outside world fades away as one enters into the Casteel Creek compound, with a new discovery around every curve,” Nobrega and Scrivens told Inman in an email. “It is a gradual process requiring passage through three gates before crossing over a dramatic steel bridge winding over a densely forested ravine, a sculptural feat of engineering that all by itself cost $1 million at that time.”
[Inman Slideshow]
One of the rooms is a retro-style ice cream parlor with marble countertops and sleek cone and topping holders on the table. A part of outside grounds have been recreated to look like a Wild West town, complete with a shooting range, a model sheriff’s office and even a jail cell as one of the rooms. Along with the house itself, Levine created a 28,000-square-foot “amenities lodge” with a five-story rock climbing wall, an indoor shooting range, a teppanyaki dining area, a gym and massage spa, an Olympic-sized pool and a hot tub.
“The ‘sheriff’s office’ is a playful part of the area on the estate referred to as the car barn and apartment areas of the estate,” Nobrega and Scrivens said. “This area is patterned after western themed town center and is just a play on the old wild west and is much more fun than a big garage apartment and gas station.”
Right before his retirement in 1997, Levine bought the land the estate sits on for $3.32 million and spent the next four years building it out with amenities.
Alongside Craig Brenson, Levine founded Cabletron in 1983. The company was an early manufacturer of ethernet and other networking equipment necessary to make the internet. Levine would then emerge as one of the early tech moguls of the 1990s — Forbes Magazine estimated his worth to be at around $625 million in 2001. More recently, Levine was in the news in 2019 after Bank of America Merrill Lynch agreed to pay him $40 million as a settlement in response to his allegations that one of its brokers “churned” him by making poor investment recommendations to receive commissions.
“The new owner will be able to reap the benefits of the current owner acquiring the land and approvals as well as constructing the improvements and will be able to hit the ground running with a turnkey estate that is all about living life and creating memories,” Nobrega and Scrivens said.