A model whose working life has been spent under other people’s lights has bought a Colorado house built around a pair of coal-miner’s sheds, and paid well under the asking price.
Admittedly, the detail that lingers belongs to a carpenter. Beside Coal Creek, in Crested Butte, Colorado, stood two old sheds of wood and corrugated metal, on the same patch of ground for a hundred years. They were taken apart and raised again over a new foundation, with each plank returned to its original spot, and a house grew around them. Bella Hadid has bought it. She has spent her working life being dressed, undressed and put back together by other people.
The Wall Street Journal had the sale as an exclusive on 10 November. It reported a price of $5.5m for a house built in 2001 around two coal-miner’s sheds from the early 1900s. The timing did the rest. A day earlier, Hadid had posted photographs on Instagram with Nathan Lacy, a Colorado native, and much of the internet read the two posts as a single story. Nothing confirms that the purchase has anything to do with him.
Hadid, who is 30, is the daughter of Yolanda Hadid, formerly of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and of Mohamed Hadid, a developer and reality-television regular. She has given no public reason for choosing Crested Butte, but what she has chosen is easy to describe: about 2,000 square feet, three bedrooms, three bathrooms and a creek. In a family whose houses have tended to make news by the acre and the storey, it is a quiet sort of announcement.
Each plank went back where it stood
The sheds were the beginning. Everything else was gathered from further afield, and the house reads like the removals inventory of a very particular nostalgia. Antique timber from an old Montana mine wraps the outside. The floors are pine reclaimed from an 18th-century barn in Virginia. The listing describes ceilings 30 feet high and beams taken from a warehouse on the Columbia River.
By our count, the house is assembled from four places before a single chair arrives: the Crested Butte sheds, the Montana mine, the Virginia barn and the Columbia River warehouse. Each was a working building once. Together they make something more like a collection, and a well-chosen one, because none of the pieces pretends to be younger than it is.
The care in the reconstruction matters more than the age of any one piece. The house itself dates from 2001, so it would be stretching things to call it old. The sheds inside it are another matter, and so is the decision to save them plank by plank instead of clearing the plot. Someone, a quarter of a century ago, took the trouble to number the boards.
A separate bunkhouse stands on the property too, which is the American West’s polite term for somewhere to put the guests. The main house sits a few feet from Coal Creek, with 200 feet of water running along the edge of the land. The materials are pine underfoot, mine timber outside, old metal on the sheds and the creek within earshot. None of it would look out of place on a working ranch, and most of it once was.
Reclaimed timber is the most expensive way yet found of making a house look as though it has always been there. This one partly has.
Crested Butte lies across the mountains from Aspen
On a map, Crested Butte and Aspen look like neighbours. In practice the Elk Mountains stand between them, and the drive from one to the other is a long way round. For buyers who want the high country without the parade that comes with its most famous resort, that wall of rock does a good deal of work.
Hadid was not a stranger to the town before she bought. Photographers caught her and Lacy grocery shopping in Crested Butte over Labor Day weekend, and the pictures did what such pictures do. They made a supermarket run look like an engagement announcement. In fact they showed two people buying food in a mountain town.
LIV Sotheby’s International Realty put the house on the market in June at $6,995,000, with Channing Boucher as the listing agent. It sold for well under that. A buyer who does not need to be anywhere in particular can afford to wait for a June price to cool, and the creek will still be there in November.
DDW’s reading is that the choice of town tells you more than the price does. Aspen is where money goes to be seen arriving. Crested Butte, across the range, is where a famous face can buy a three-bedroom house of salvaged pine and expect, within reason, to be left to unpack.
Her father built on a grander scale
Mohamed Hadid builds houses for a living, and he has never been accused of thinking small. In 2011 he bought a plot in Bel-Air and set about building a house of 30,000 square feet on it. The project drew international attention. Half-finished, it was eventually auctioned for $5 million, after its asking price had been cut to the very sum his daughter has now paid for her Colorado creekside house.
It is hard to invent a neater rhyme than that. One generation’s unsellable asking price becomes the next generation’s purchase price, and the money buys a fifteenth of the floor space. By DDW’s reckoning, the Crested Butte house is roughly a fifteenth of the size of the one her father built in Los Angeles. It also has the advantage of being finished.
The two houses could hardly be more different in temperament. The Bel-Air project was a developer’s statement, new, enormous and built upwards from a bare plot. The house on Coal Creek is a restorer’s house, small, pieced together and built around what was already standing. One family, two instincts: the father adds, the daughter keeps.
Developers’ children grow up around drawings, site visits and the particular optimism of a project that is going to be magnificent once it is done. A daughter who chooses instead a house whose story is already complete has made a choice of her own. It may not be a reaction, though it reads like one.
Her mother is selling Carousel Farm
Yolanda Hadid’s taste in property runs to land. In 2017 she bought an estate in Solebury, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, once known as Carousel Farm, and property records put the price at a little under $4m. She is now selling its 32 acres. She has also followed her daughter to Texas, building a place there that overlooks a river.
Bella’s own Texas chapter began in March 2024, when reports had her buying a rural property near Fort Worth, which she never confirmed. What is a matter of record is the horses. Hadid is a lifelong equestrian who competes in cutting events, and the National Cutting Horse Association’s 2024 Amateur Rider of the Year list placed her 89th, with more than $13,000 in earnings. Eighty-ninth is a respectable showing in a sport where the cattle take no interest in anyone’s Instagram following.
The pattern is easier to see from a distance. The mother has moved from a Pennsylvania farm towards a Texas river. The daughter has gone from the Fort Worth reports to a Colorado creek. The Hadid women keep heading for open ground, water and animals, and away from the hillside addresses where their family name first became property news.
None of this amounts to a dynasty, and it would be a stretch to call it one. It looks more like a family that has learned, house by house, what it actually wants to live in. Yolanda’s answer was acres; Bella’s, for now, is three bedrooms and a bunkhouse beside a creek.
A Colorado native in the photographs
Nathan Lacy is 38 and grew up in Colorado. He works as an estimator and project manager for his family’s construction business. He is also the brother of Rachael Lacy, an artist and a close friend of Hadid’s who shares her devotion to horses. That is a familiar way for a friendship circle to become something else, and a hard one to make look glamorous.
The photographs that set everything off came from the Colorado Avalanche game in Denver on 7 November, Hockey Fights Cancer Night. Hadid posted them on 9 November. The Journal’s exclusive followed the next morning, and two separate pieces of news became, for a great many people online, one tidy narrative about a model, a cowboy and a cabin.
Tidy narratives are rarely accurate, and this one has not been confirmed. What can be said is a coincidence, and a pleasing one. Hadid has bought a house admired almost entirely for its carpentry, at a moment when she is photographed beside a man who prices building jobs for a living. Whether he has views on how the sheds were put back together is his business, and he has kept it so.
Hadid has said nothing in public about the house. Down by Coal Creek, each plank of the old sheds sits where it sat a century ago.
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