LARKSPUR • Meet the Flintstones.

Al and Karen Shain are the modern stone age family thanks to The Rock House, the property they bought in 2021 that earned them national attention and the throwback moniker.

Upon entering the cul-de-sac in the Perry Park community in Douglas County, the reason for the nickname is immediately clear — there’s a big rock in that thar house at 6619 Apache Place.

The 2,432-square-foot house is built around a giant, 35-foot tall sandstone rock. It’s the same sort of 200 million-year-old rocks found in Garden of the Gods, the Flatirons in Boulder, and up and down the Front Range.

“You get a piece of nature inside your home,” Al said. “If you paid by the pound, it’s a million-dollar rock. We’ve tried to give the house an open air architecture so you can always view the rock from any room you’re in, just as you would view an open piece of art work that was there. It’s like living in Garden of the Gods in a tent, but now we’ve actually got a house.”

The property sits on a 1-acre lot, but this is no regular lot, hemmed in on all sides by other buildings. To the west is a 1-acre open space lot that will never be built out. To the north is open space looking toward Castle Rock, though a ridge prevents you from seeing civilization. The house has three sides of open space, a dream for those who love the sound of silence only perforated by the squawk of blue jays and magpies.

“It’s complete solitude, as if someone put ear muffs on you,” Al said.

The Shains bought the house in 2021 from the original owner, who built it in 2000. He was a free-spirited guy, Al said, who never finished the bottom floor, leaving it dirt. And he built the upstairs toilet facing out and visible for all the neighborhood to see its occupant doing their business.

But the Shains, who lived in a ranch house in Aurora, were enraptured.

“We’ve lived in Colorado all our lives,” Al said. “It was on Google and Zillow and we stood outside and said this is amazing. We decided there and then we wanted to buy the house. It didn’t matter what condition it was in.”

“We didn’t even see the inside,” Karen said.

That was almost four years ago. Today, though, after extensive remodeling, the Shains are in a different mindset. It’s time for them to retire and move to the East Coast where their two daughters and two grandkids live. So they put the house on the market in August, and attracted national attention after the unusual home was highlighted on the popular social media account Zillow Gone Wild, Fox News and other media sources. Two buyers competed for the nearly $1 million home, but both backed out.

Since then the Shains have put the house back on the market, for a price of $935,000, and recently took it back off. They’ll try to sell again in the spring.

“Some people come out and say it’s just two bedrooms,” Al said. “And I say yeah, it’s two bedrooms with 360 degrees of views and privacy and an extra acre of open space all around you.”

Plus, that living, breathing, dynamic stone that greets inhabitants at every turn and even serves as a history lesson of the Earth.

Al likes to point out the darker layer in the rock, what’s known as the K-T line, caused by the asteroid that hit the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico millions of years ago and led to the extinction of dinosaurs and most other life. The same stratification can be seen in all the other sandstone rocks scattered throughout the property and around Colorado.

“It kicked up all that earth when the asteroid hit and came back down throughout Colorado,” Al said. “This is the K-T layer right there. It dissolves and disintegrates at different layers. Some of the other rocks are almost tilting. They’re barely standing up on edge because the K-T layer is at the very bottom of it. It’s got this massive layer of sediment that was above it. The K-T layer disintegrates at a different rate.”

As one might imagine, there are a few challenges posed by living with a rock. Dust, for one, and sealing the outside edges every other year so water doesn’t seep through.

The rock also acts as an insulator. If it’s 100 degrees, it stays warm. If it drops to minus-20 for multiple days, it gets cool.

“It radiates the heat back out at night so we leave the windows open all the time,” Al said.

And if somebody is hankering to climb that piece of history, there’s a ladder around back by the outdoor hot tub, built into the rocks so you can climb up, essentially giving someone a chance to rock climb their own house.

“You go out at night and the Milky Way comes out,” Al said. “It’s a dark neighborhood, no streetlights. We’ve got pictures of every critter that comes along: bears, deer, elk, mountain lions, bobcats, wild turkeys. And we’ve got the hot tub out back, which is one of my favorite rooms in the house.”

“We love it,” Karen said. “We’re never going to find another place like this ever.”