Some properties are simply built. Others are built around a life. For more than twenty years, this mountainside in Missouri Heights was the latter — the setting where James Surls and Charmaine Locke made their art, raised it, and sent it out into the world.
They arrived to almost nothing: a well, a stretch of untouched land, and a view toward Mount Sopris that stopped them in their tracks. From that beginning came a home and two working studios, each carrying the language of their sculpture in its lines. Charmaine's studio became a place of painting and gathering, host to dinners, exhibitions, and evenings that drew other artists from around the valley into her orbit. James's fabrication barn, built at the scale his large-format sculpture demanded, gave rise to work that now stands in Singapore, in the Holocaust and Human Rights Museum in Dallas, and at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
That chapter is closing. James and Charmaine are returning to Texas to open the Surls + Locke Museum of Art, and the property that shaped decades of their work is ready for its next one.
What they leave behind is uncommon by any measure. Sixteen acres bordering BLM land on the mesa above Carbondale, not part of any HOA, with southern exposure and gentle, usable topography rare for the area. The views run uninterrupted across Mount Sopris, Chair Mountain, and the Elk Mountain Range. Beyond the 3,955-square-foot residence sit two heated outbuildings totaling more than 11,000 square feet. Downtown Carbondale and Willits are ten to fifteen minutes away, Aspen and Snowmass forty.
Its next chapter isn't written. This is a home and a working compound at once, which means it holds real potential in more than one direction. For an artist, it's a studio and fabrication space already proven at scale. For a collector, it's a private gallery with room to show and to live alongside the work. For a family or a group with a broader vision, it's a foundation for something communal, a retreat, a residency, even a museum of its own. Few properties in this valley, or anywhere, offer that range of possibility on a single piece of ground.
Living here also means living inside one of the most genuinely supportive artist communities in the country. Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, the Aspen Art Museum, and Carbondale Arts, have spent decades building a valley that doesn't just tolerate serious creative work, it collaborates with it, funds it, and shows up for it. That's not incidental to this property. It's the reason two artists chose it and stayed over twenty years.
Listed by Gabriella Sutro and Audrey Imhoff, Coldwell Banker Mason Morse.
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