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RH, a luxury home furnishing company that began developing projects in Aspen alongside developer Mark Hunt in 2021, is now the sole owner of the former Crystal Palace building that is being redeveloped into an RH Guesthouse.
The company acquired the property in full as part of a series of transactions with Hunt in May in which the two separated ownership of several shared assets across Aspen, according to the company’s most recent quarterly financial report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing reported the property RH plans to open as an RH Guesthouse “was transferred to an entity wholly owned by us.”
But the company also fully acquired several other Aspen properties.
In a June 2026 first-quarter earnings call, RH Chairman and CEO Gary Friedman said the company now has “100% control” over eight Aspen properties.
“We just completed a transaction inside our Aspen real estate,” Friedman said during the June 11 call. “We are, you know, we sold some properties to our partner and [they] sold the property to us and now we have more independent control of the process … a lot of properties that we can monetize more quickly than less quickly.”
“We do not have to work through JV [ joint venture] and a partnership to kind of monetize things,” he added.
Hunt was not named in the SEC filings. But RH announced in 2021 that it was partnering with Hunt on multiple residential and commercial real estate projects in Aspen, aiming to develop what it called an “Aspen ecosystem” — including a hotel, gallery, retail and other residential real estate. The Aspen Daily News reported at the time that RH was “not only a long-term tenant of said properties but also a part owner.”
In addition to the former Crystal Palace building being redeveloped into RH Guesthouse, the Aspen ecosystem was slated to include a redevelopment of the former Bidwell Building at East Cooper Avenue and South Galena Street, across from the Paradise Bakery corner, into RH Bespoke Gallery; a redevelopment of the former Boomerang Lodge at 500 W. Hopkins Ave. into an RH residential project; and an RH Residence on Red Mountain.
Redevelopment of the RH Guesthouse and RH Bespoke Gallery are both underway. In early 2025, the Red Mountain property — which was intended to be a fully furnished six-bedroom home — sold for $26 million. RH received $15 million as part of that transaction.
A third-party information liaison for RH told the Aspen Daily News in an email that RH sold the undeveloped Boomerang Lodge as part of the transaction, but did not answer a question about whether it would still be part of the RH “ecosystem.”
It is unclear who retained full ownership of the RH Bespoke Gallery property.
As part of the transaction in which RH acquired full ownership of the Guesthouse, the company reported it paid off $32 million in outstanding debt on the property.
Hunt purchased the former Crystal Palace dinner theater in 2013. It became the center of a controversy in fall 2024 due to Hunt’s request to raze and reconstruct the last remaining wall on the former dinner theater building that featured the storied Owl Cigar mural.
In 2017, Aspen’s Historic Preservation Commission originally agreed to allow demolition and reconstruction of the building’s east and north facades. During construction of the RH Guesthouse project, Hunt’s team found the west wall — which faced Monarch Street and featured the Owl Cigar mural — was not historic and instead reflected changes in materials over the years.
During an Oct. 2, 2024, meeting, HPC members voted 4-3 to approve Hunt’s application to raze the western wall, including the Owl Cigar mural, which he said would be replicated and relocated to the center of the wall.
Hunt told the HPC during that meeting that “the Crystal Palace as we know it is gone.”
“It’s gone and it turns out, it was gone long before we made the decision based on what we thought the Crystal Palace was,” he said at the time. “I don’t want to be viewed that I’m looking to take away or destroying pieces of Aspen’s history. I want to be ultimately known that I’m adding to it.”
Hunt did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
The old Owl Cigar mural is pictured on the western wall of the former Crystal Palace building before it was torn down. Aspen Daily News file
As part of the transactions, Hunt became “the sole owner of the undeveloped Aspen properties from the Aspen LLCs and repaid outstanding debt associated with those properties,” according to the RH first-quarter filing.
It is unclear what other properties were part of the transactions. But Hunt and RH appeared to co-own several Aspen properties outside of those intended to be redeveloped into the “Aspen ecosystem.”
In a September 2025 second-quarter earnings call, RH Chairman and CEO Gary Friedman called RH a “key retail landlord in the core of Aspen.”
“It’s more unique than any place I’ve seen from the aggregation of wealth and influence,” Friedman said of Aspen during the earnings call.
“We had an ability to build two brand new buildings, which is on two of the best corners in town,” he added, referring to the former Crystal Palace and Bidwell buildings.
But he also told shareholders that RH was the landlord to several stores in town at different locations, including Chanel, Gucci, Lululemon and Catch Steak.
Friedman has told shareholders in several recent earnings calls that the company wants to generate about $500 million from selling some of its real estate portfolio.
Some of that may happen in Aspen, where the remaining properties RH acquired “consist primarily of leased projects on a number of prime real estate locations in Aspen that we believe can also be easily sold,” according to the most recent quarterly report.
Jason Miller, chief investment officer of Michigan-based Grand Sakwa Properties, is a real estate investor and developer who has written extensively about RH’s public filings. RH is not one of his tenants, but he follows the luxury brand closely.
He said the transactions likely give each party “more control over how the projects that they fully own going forward can be sold, developed, re-tenanted, renovated, whatever you want to call it.”
“Generally speaking, when these types of partnerships break up, you know, it’s not always a bad thing,” Miller said. “Oftentimes it’s a very good thing. For RH in particular, it’s probably an even better thing because it will help them potentially monetize their real estate portfolio faster than would otherwise have been the case.”
Outside of previous RH ventures, work recently began on Hunt’s Base Lodge hotel development at 730 E. Cooper Ave. The location was the site of the Buckhorn Arms Building — once home to Johnny McGuire’s, Bamboo Bear and Domino’s Pizza. The building was shuttered in 2021 and, in May, was demolished shortly after a building permit was issued for the project.
No progress has been made on the historic Red Onion restaurant space or the housing development at 404 Park Ave., both Hunt-owned properties, Aspen Community Development Director Ben Anderson told the Aspen Daily News in an email on Wednesday.
Formal documents to renovate the interior of the Red Onion have not been filed with the city. The restaurant and bar has been vacant for nearly five years.
The 404 Park Ave. property received development entitlements for a 28-unit affordable multifamily housing project by the building’s previous owner, Peter Fornell. He pursued a building permit based on those approvals that was ready for issuance, but was never picked up, and the project has been vacant for more than five years after Fornell sold the building to Hunt.
