A 3,000-square-foot dwelling built into the caves near Glenwood Springs, CO, is a rocky sight to behold.

Cave of Chimes is a one-of-a-kind home nestled in the walls of the Glenwood Springs Canyon. It could be yours for the steep price of $2,450,000.

The cave home is only a small portion of the property. (There’s also space above ground to build another home.) Getting to the underground dwelling is an adventure in itself.

What lies beneath

“You drive up, and you don’t know anything’s there. Then you climb into the four-person elevator, flip a switch, and go down into the cave system,” explains Will Vannice, who is co-listing the cave dwelling with Mike Henry, both of Integrated Mountain Properties.

“You see a metal shed, and you don’t even know there’s a residence down below, off the side of a cliff where the elevator goes down.”

The only things on the surface are that metal toolshed and the elevator shaft.

The cave home came about after the owner did a bit of soul searching at Mount Sinai in Egypt in the 1970s, Vannice says.

“As he puts it, the Lord that was guiding him as a higher power told him he needed to make a home in a cave,” he adds. “So, the first thing he did when he got home was he started building this residence basically inside of this cave.”

Amazingly, the homeowner did most of the work himself, including blasting the elevator shaft, which goes down 120 feet to the residence.

“There are four different rooms. There’s a living room, a kitchen with a master bedroom, kind of attached to the kitchen, and then you go outside on the deck to come into an entertainment room, which has a pool table in it,” Vannice says. There’s also a guest room with a king-sized bed and a bathroom.

But that’s only a small part of the 25-acre property. Hope you like tunnels!

“There’s a little door in the back of the residence that goes into the cavern system, which is said to be up to about 500 feet of tunnels, and they’ve only been about 250 feet into it,” he says.

In fact, you can tap on flowing chimes to hear echoes through the cave, hence the name.

Cave caveat

The cave system, with stalagmite and stalactite formations, has been featured in the book “Caves of Colorado.” Vannice says the owner plans to have a team of spelunkers survey and research the cave.

The residence has electricity, heating, and plumbing, Vannice says. Everything works in the house, but there’s a caveat.

“I learned in this process that there are no codes per se below ground,” he says. “They never did get a building permit to build this, but then again, the county has known about it for 40 years and never said a thing about it.”

The listing notes that there’s a choice of building sites on the property, which come with Glenwood Canyon and Colorado River views. The buyer gets all that—and a cool cave house.

“There are only a handful of cave residences out there,” Vannice says.

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