Hand-built cabin grew into $6M Sacramento area estate with airfield, rec center

Kenneth Roebbelen’s luxury estate outside Sacramento began much more modestly than the sprawling, eye-popping compound it is today.

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His father acquired the original land in the late 1960s. When Roebbelen began building a cabin there as a UC Davis student and journeyman carpenter, his father imposed a condition that made the project part construction job, part character test.

“The rule was I had to only use hand tools, no power tools, no electricity,” Roebbelen said.

He came up on weekends and built, mostly so he wouldn’t have to live in an apartment after leaving college, Roebbelen said. The original 1974 cabin remains today, and is now part of an amazing complex that grew along with Roebbelen’s career, his family and the broader landholding.

Roebbelen is former president of prominent, family-owned Roebbelen Contracting Inc., founded by his father, Hans Roebbelen, in 1959. The family eventually owned 623 acres stretching to Folsom Lake. The gated El Dorado Hills estate sits on its own 48-acre parcel and is on the market for $6 million.

El Dorado Hills is about 30 miles east of downtown Sacramento.

Home built in phases

A larger house came after the cabin, where Roebbelen and his wife, Kimberly, raised their three children. The main residence’s elegant upper portion was built between 2008 and 2010, and a pool and pool house — which presents itself more as a municipal recreation center — were added in 2024. The goal, Roebbelen said, was to make the different chapters feel as if they had always belonged together.

“You’re doing all this stuff in different phases of your life, and part of the goal is to make it look like it was done at one time,” he said. “That it was all coordinated.”

That coordination is easiest to appreciate inside. The main residence is a bold sweep of cherrywood ceilings, Brazilian cherry floors, hydronically heated floors and carved mahogany double doors. A staircase rises more than 40 feet, creating a dramatic vertical center for the home. The primary suite has dual walk-in closets, a soaking tub surrounded by 10-foot tumbled travertine stone walls, a steam shower, dry sauna and private fitness area.

The home’s wrought-iron double doors open into an arrival foyer, where soaring ceilings and custom stone floors set the tone for the entire estate. An art gallery serves as the connecting spine between the original cabin, the older portion of the home and the newer main house upstairs.

Carved wine cellar doors

The most memorable details, though, are not necessarily the newest or most expensive. The mahogany wine cellar doors were intricately carved in Monterrey, Mexico. A large freezer door, salvaged from a Sacramento High School remodeling project when Roebbelen was still in high school, now serves the walk-in refrigerator and freezer. He estimates it is nearly a century old.

It is a fitting relic for a home built around the idea that the past should not be discarded just because something new is being added.

A 9,800-square-foot main residence with enough room for several generations to live there, a large spring-fed fishing pond, a runway and hangar and the 2,200-square-foot pool house, or “rec center,” only begin to round out the unusual listing.

The compound also comes with a helipad, a six-car garage, storage for RVs and boats, a wine cellar for 2,300 bottles and a massive, fertile garden built during the COVID-19 pandemic next to a commercial-grade greenhouse.

Art and sculpture play a central role in the character of the residence. At the entry gate, visitors are greeted by dramatic bronze mustangs by Auburn sculptor Doug Van Howd, a work titled “Spirit of Nevada.” Down by the expanded pond, a striking statue of a woman in a white dress overlooks the water, created by Ken Shutt, an artist Roebbelen discovered through his installations at the Grand Wailea in Maui and later commissioned. These pieces, along with the carved mahogany doors, help tie the home’s architecture to a personal, curated collection of art that has evolved alongside the estate itself.

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Roebbelen has made 2155 Salmon Valley Lane the kind of place where children ride bikes over to fish in the pond, neighbors can come over on a whim to swim, and a family wedding can move from a pergola to a band stage to a food truck without anyone having to leave the property.

Junior Olympic lap pool

The pool house shifts the mood from family compound to private club. Its 82-foot junior Olympic lap pool is joined by a hot tub, children’s pool, men’s and women’s private locker rooms accessed through wooden doors imported from India — said to be perhaps 300 years old — a commercial-grade kitchen, bar and entertainment space. The pool and spa decks are covered entirely in Versailles-pattern tumbled travertine stone and surrounded by expansive views in every direction.

Roebbelen said neighbors use the pool facility several times a week for swimming, fishing and informal gatherings. Thirty or 40 people can fit comfortably inside, he said — but probably a lot more.

The property has hosted larger occasions, too. For one daughter’s 2011 wedding, Roebbelen built a pergola for the vows and a stage for a 13-piece band. Food vendors and roughly 200 guests filled the open drive area, he said. The estate also has hosted charity events.

“That’s what you do when you have a big house. You share it,” the listing agent Chris Wolfe of eXp Realty said.

The heart of the estate is the spring-fed pond. Roebbelen expanded it to roughly twice its former surface area. It is fed by a spring, stocked with bass and bluegill, and connected to a creek. Neighborhood children fish there, and Roebbelen gave them an outdoor closet for their rods so they would not have to haul them home after every visit.

The pond is both a dramatic visual focal point and a functional gathering place with several seating areas. Much of the residence now looks out over the water.

“We just designed the house to kind of fit the pond,” he said.

Greenhouse, garden, runway

A commercial-size greenhouse, built around 2010, became especially useful during the COVID-19 pandemic. Roebbelen used it to start vegetable plants in winter, then moved them to the garden when the soil warmed. Neighbors ate from the garden, and excess produce went to a food bank in Folsom. Now that Roebbelen and his wife travel more often, neighbors are invited to grow their own crops there.

The runway is another inheritance. Roebbelen’s father installed it and was an avid pilot. When Roebbelen ran the construction company, the airstrip helped him reach projects across the Western United States, with pilot project managers flying him to job sites and home again the same day. The hangar and helipad remain part of the sale.

There is also a practical side to all the spectacle. The house has a metal roof, extensive stone construction, a roughly 38-kilowatt solar system and 10 Tesla batteries. Roebbelen said the setup generally offsets the property’s electricity consumption, although the pool house occasionally pushed use beyond that balance.

Roebbelen and his wife are selling as they spend more time traveling and face the work of maintaining an estate of this scale.

Beyond its sheer size and resort-level amenities, the estate’s value lies in the kind of construction and materials that are difficult to replicate at today’s costs. From massive stonework and custom-imported doors to extensive travertine, cherry wood and granite hardscape, the property reflects decades of investment and craftsmanship. Wolfe said the $6 million asking price is effectively a discount on the property’s replacement cost.

“To build this today would be $15 million,” he said. “ I mean, you couldn’t do it. It’s absolutely worth every nickel.”

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