Tom Cruise’s Action-Packed Colorado Estate Lists For $50 Million

Tom Cruise’s Telluride, Colorado, estate—which is full of sports-oriented amenities befitting an action star—is returning to market for approx. $50 million.

This isn’t Mr Cruise’s first effort to sell: Seven years ago, he tapped a real-estate agent to market the property for around $76 million, though it was never publicly listed, according to current listing agents Eric Lavey of LIV Sotheby’s International Realty and his colleague Dan Dockray. “I’m not sure [Cruise] was ready to sell it yet,” Mr Lavey said.

Ultra-private, the roughly 320-acre property is located at the end of a gated mile-long driveway that is surrounded by a forest of Aspen trees. It borders a national forest on three sides and is a few minutes downtown Telluride. Located on a hillside, the property sits at an elevation that allows the owner to look down on planes arriving at the nearby airport, the agents said.

“Everybody knows who owns this property, but you can’t see it from almost anywhere,” said Mr Dockray.

Mr Cruise spent several years designing and constructing the native stone-and-cedar home, which was completed in 1994. Roughly, 10,000 square feet, the four-bedroom house is designed in classic mountain style, with wood-beamed ceilings, wood-panelled walls and stone fireplaces. There is also a three-bedroom guesthouse on the property.

The activity-oriented features include a large sports court, a dirt bike and snowmobile track and an extensive network of trails for hiking, snowshoeing and all-terrain vehicles. There is also a spa, an office and a three-car garage.

A spokeswoman for Mr Cruise didn’t respond to a request for comment on his reasons for selling. The listing agents said they believed the actor hadn’t used the house in quite some time. They noted that the market in Telluride has been extremely active over the past few months as a result of the Covid-19 crisis, with buyers coming in from major cities across the country.

“People sat down during this lockdown and said ‘What am i doing with my life? I want a better lifestyle,’” Mr Dockray said.

Mr Cruise, 58, has appeared in movies like “Top Gun” and the “Mission Impossible” franchise. He has recently been filming in Europe.

Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.

This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.

“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.

“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”

Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.

He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.

“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.

“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”

Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.

Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.

“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.

“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?

“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”

At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.

“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”

And there’s no AI option for that.

Tom Cruise’s Action-Packed Colorado Estate Lists For $50 Million

The actor’s Telluride property is as action-packed as his films.

A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities