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"View Slideshow\n\nAs a kid growing up in the Bronx, I was always fascinated by cowboys\u2014Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers,\" says music and entertainment executive Tommy Mottola. \"I watched westerns, made my parents take me to rodeos and got totally into the horses, the gear. And being an outdoorsman\u2014I love hunting, fishing, camping\u2014I always dreamed of a log home. So when I saw this property, I instantly knew that this was as good as it gets.\"\n\nMottola, chairman of Casablanca Records and The Mottola Company, knows a hit when he hears\u2014and sees\u2014it. So it's not surprising that once he and his wife, Latin superstar Thalia, strode into the magnificent, five-bedroom, 15,000-square-foot log house, sitting on 700 choice acres in Snowmass Village\u2014a stone's throw from Aspen\u2014it was a done deal by lunch.\n\n\"By the time we sat down in the backyard and had a sandwich,\" he recalls, \"it was over\u2014finished.\"\n\n\"I'm on a continual shopping spree. If I see things I like, I buy them and put them away,\" Mottola says.\n\nThough not for Mottola, for whom the work had just begun. \"I did this all by myself, just me and my wife, who loves it and has fabulous taste. I bring people in, use various sources, but yes, unfortunately, I do my own houses,\" says the former CEO and chairman of Sony Music Entertainment, who counts among those design projects a Greenwich, Connecticut, home and the Bedford, New York, estate he shared with his former wife Mariah Carey. \"That was my paid education\u2014doing everything right and wrong, paying for it when it was wrong. Since then I've done 10.\"\n\nIncluding his \"masterpiece,\" the Miami pad whose sale prompted Mottola's move to Colorado. His latest creation is set on a scenic swath of Wildcat Ranch, a 6,500-acre property divided into 14 ranches and formerly owned by Michael Douglas. When Douglas first told him about it, Mottola says, \"I didn't think I wanted to be that far from town. And we were still in Miami, which we finally got tired of. Thalia is a big star in the Latin world, so we had tour boats, photographers with five-foot lenses, coming by every hour. In the end, it just wasn't fun anymore. So I said, Let's look for a little house in Aspen'\u2014nothing this elaborate, because I figured we'd only come once a year. Now I wish we could live here full time.\"\n\nMottola is a self-admitted \"frustrated architect\" whose design M.O. is tradition with a twist\u2014a style that shows in furnishings like the cowhide rugs he hired designer Linda Bedell to make. \"They're sewn together like one big area rug\u2014but free-form, so it's funky,\" Mottola says. To \"keep the feel going\" in the living room, he opted for swagged, floor-to-ceiling suede draperies.\n\nThat hip, western vibe dominates the master suite, which is anchored by a custom-made Ralph Lauren red-velvet-upholstered sleigh bed. \"Ralph made this great bed, but just for the showroom. So I called his office and made him duplicate it for me. Yes, it's red velvet, but with tartans for bedding, it doesn't look like a bordello, it looks like Ralph. It works. So we built everything else around it.\" (Lauren's colorful bedding also graces beds in the property's pair of 2,000-square-foot guesthouses\u2014\"a discontinued design they couldn't locate,\" Mottola admits, \"that I finally found in a Ralph Lauren Outlet.\")\n\nAs to why this musical star-maker is hanging around in outlets, well, as he confesses with a rueful chuckle, \"I'm on a continual shopping spree. If I see things I like, I buy them and put them away,\" such as the antique holsters casually draped over the hall bench, painted with western scenes: cowboy hats and Indian headdresses\u2014\"the whole fantasy.\"\n\nMottola pauses, momentarily relishing another favorite fantasy. \"Honestly, if I could do this as a business and make money, I'd love to. Unfortunately, it costs more than you can make. Still, I love it; for me it's 100 percent therapy.\"\n\nA therapeutic treatment that more than a few folks wish he'd lavish on them. \"I have a lot of friends in Aspen, far wealthier than I, who say, I want you to do a house for me,' \" he says with a laugh. \"But as I always tell them, Listen, man, I've got enough problems.' \""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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