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Listing Spotlight: 28+ Acre Equestrian Estate Near Millarville

A turnkey horse property with a custom 5,700+ square foot home, indoor riding arena, full barn complex and Foothills views, tucked at the end of a quiet dead-end road just southwest of Calgary.

The Custom Home: 5,700+ Square Feet of Thoughtful Living

The home itself is the kind of build that does not happen by accident. Just over 4,400 square feet sits above grade, with another 1,300 square feet of finished space on the lower level, bringing the total to more than 5,700 square feet of finished living area. The exterior is a classic deep-red farmhouse with arched dormers, a covered front verandah, and a steeply pitched roof that suits both the architecture of the home and the climate of the Foothills.

Inside, the layout works equally well for everyday family life and for the kind of large-scale entertaining that this kind of property invites. Four bedrooms and six bathrooms provide genuine flexibility for families, guests and multi-generational living. Upstairs, a massive bonus room offers true open-canvas potential: a home theatre, a games room, a teen retreat, a private studio, a yoga or fitness space, a library. The right answer depends entirely on how you live.

Comfort Built In

Acreage properties often look beautiful on the listing photos and feel less beautiful when the December wind picks up. This home was built with the climate in mind. The lower level has in-floor heating, which is the kind of feature that quietly transforms how a basement actually gets used. Three forced-air furnaces and three central air conditioners provide zoned year-round climate control across the home's footprint, which matters when you have over 5,700 square feet to keep comfortable.

New luxury vinyl plank flooring has been installed throughout the main and upper levels, offering both durability (genuinely important in a rural home where boots, dogs and the occasional barn visitor are part of daily life) and a fresh, contemporary aesthetic that updates the entire feel of the interior without losing the farmhouse character of the architecture.

The Four-Car Heated Garage

Attached to the home, the four-car heated garage is the kind of feature that buyers either understand immediately or have to be talked through. For anyone who keeps trucks, trailers, recreational vehicles, ATVs, snowmobiles, or simply enough vehicles to support a working acreage operation, a heated four-car attached garage is not a luxury, it is operational infrastructure. Cold mornings, hot starts, frozen locks and trailer hookups in minus 25 weather: all solved.

Equestrian Infrastructure: Turnkey for Any Discipline

The equestrian side of this property is what genuinely sets it apart. Most horse properties in the Foothills offer some combination of pasture, a shelter or two, and maybe a small barn. Building out a complete working operation from those bones takes years and a substantial budget. This property has already done all of that work.

The Indoor Riding Arena

The indoor riding arena alone is the kind of feature that converts an acreage from a recreational hobby property into something that can support serious year-round riding. In Foothills County, where winter weather can shut down outdoor riding for months at a time, having an indoor space transforms what is possible. Lessons, training, conditioning, exercise, foal handling all continue regardless of the temperature outside. For competitive riders, this is the difference between maintaining season form and losing it every winter.

Barn, Stalls and Shelters

The barn complex includes:

• Five horse stalls inside the main barn
• A dedicated run-in shelter with hay storage
• A cutting pen for working horses
• Seven horse shelters distributed across the property, allowing flexible turnout configurations and reliable wind/weather protection for animals at pasture
• Double fencing and cross fencing across the acreage, providing genuine paddock management options for rotational grazing, separating animals, or managing introduction of new horses

The Quonset and Heated Shop

Separate from the barn, the Quonset hut contains a heated shop with an overhead door. For anyone running an acreage operation, a heated shop is one of the most-used buildings on a property. Equipment repair, tack maintenance, project work, winter projects: having a dedicated heated workspace with overhead access is genuine infrastructure that supports both the horse operation and everyday rural life. The Quonset connects through to the main barn area, creating a logical flow between workspace, equipment storage and animal management.

The 28+ Acres: Water, Pasture and Views

Twenty-eight acres in this part of the Foothills gives you genuine privacy, real working horse capacity, and the kind of view that does not get old. The land has been thoughtfully developed for equestrian use, with mature trees providing windbreak and shade, open pasture for grazing and turnout, and natural topography that the property has worked with rather than against.

Water on the Property

For any acreage, especially a horse property, water is the foundational variable. This property has been set up well:

• Three spring-fed water troughs servicing the property
• Two of the three troughs run year-round, which dramatically reduces winter water management workload (anyone who has hand-hauled water in minus 30 weather knows exactly what this means in practical terms)
• A seasonal creek runs through the property, adding both ecological character and practical value
• The water setup means horses have reliable access to fresh water across the paddock configuration, regardless of season

Privacy and Setting

The property sits near the end of a quiet dead-end road. This matters more than the listing details usually convey. A dead-end road means no through traffic, no commuter shortcuts, no random vehicles passing the gate. For acreage owners who chose the country specifically for the quiet, a dead-end road is the difference between a property that delivers genuine peace and one that simply looks peaceful on a summer afternoon.

The views from the property encompass the rolling Foothills landscape that defines this part of southern Alberta: green pastures in summer, golden grasses in fall, snowfields in winter, with the Rockies visible to the west on clear days. This is not a property that needs staging photography to look like what it is.

Location: Why Millarville

The hamlet of Millarville sits in Foothills County, approximately 35 kilometres southwest of Calgary's city limits, at the intersection of the Cowboy Trail (Highway 22) and Highway 549. The drive to southwest Calgary takes approximately 30 to 40 minutes via Highway 22 and either 22X or 8th Street SW, depending on which part of the city you are headed to.

Millarville is the kind of place where the word "community" still means something practical. The hamlet itself is small (population around 60), but the surrounding rural area is full of working acreages, equestrian properties and country families who have built genuine social and operational networks over decades. For new arrivals to the area, that local network is often the difference between a property that feels isolated and one that feels embedded.

What Millarville Is Known For

• Millarville Farmers' Market: One of the largest outdoor farmers markets in southern Alberta, running every Saturday from mid-June through to Thanksgiving, with a popular Christmas market run in November. Genuine local growers, ranchers, food producers and craftspeople.
• Millarville Racetrack and Agricultural Society: A century-plus institution (founded 1907) hosting horse races, rodeo, the Priddis and Millarville Fair, the Half Marathon, and family-oriented events year-round. Also home to a 185-foot indoor riding arena available for rentals.
• Millarville Christ Church: A century-old spruce log Anglican church set in the rolling hills, one of the most photographed small churches in southern Alberta.
• Leighton Art Centre: A regional art gallery and historic property celebrating Alberta artists.
• Equestrian community: Millarville sits at the heart of one of southern Alberta's most established equestrian regions, with multiple training facilities, trainers, farriers, equine veterinarians, and feed suppliers operating within a short drive.
• Access to Kananaskis Country and the Rockies: Approximately one hour to the eastern edges of Kananaskis, giving residents weekend mountain access without committing to Canmore traffic.

Schools and Services

Millarville Community School (Foothills School Division) serves kindergarten through Grade 8 students from the area. For high school and additional schooling options, students typically attend designated schools in Okotoks, Black Diamond, Turner Valley or surrounding communities. Black Diamond and Turner Valley both offer additional shopping, services and healthcare facilities, and Okotoks (approximately 25 minutes east) provides full retail, the Okotoks Recreation Centre, additional schools, and healthcare access.

Typical Drive Times from Millarville

• Southwest Calgary (Shawnessy, Bridlewood, Spruce Cliff): 30 to 40 minutes
• Downtown Calgary: 45 to 55 minutes depending on traffic
• Okotoks: 25 minutes
• Turner Valley and Black Diamond: 15 to 20 minutes
• Spruce Meadows: 25 to 30 minutes
• Bragg Creek: 30 to 35 minutes
• Kananaskis Country (eastern edge): Approximately 60 minutes
• Banff: Approximately 90 to 100 minutes

Who This Property Fits

Not every acreage suits every buyer, and being honest about fit usually leads to better outcomes for everyone. Here are the buyer profiles for whom this property is genuinely well matched:

• The competitive equestrian. If you ride competitively in any discipline, the combination of indoor arena, cutting pen, double and cross fencing, seven shelters and a five-stall barn supports the kind of year-round training and conditioning that competitive performance requires. This is a property where you can host clinics, work with trainers, board your horses at home rather than commute to a boarding facility, and maintain a winter training schedule that other Foothills properties simply cannot support.
• The recreational rider with multiple horses. If you own three to ten horses for recreation, family riding, or breeding, this property gives you the infrastructure to manage them well. The water setup, pasture management options, and shelter distribution mean you can actually enjoy your horses rather than spending every weekend on basic logistics.
• The family wanting space and privacy. Even setting aside the equestrian features, this is a substantial home on 28+ acres at the end of a dead-end road, 30 to 40 minutes from southwest Calgary. For families with children who want them to grow up with land, animals and genuine outdoor freedom, this property delivers what city neighbourhoods cannot.
• The work-from-home professional. The home's size (4,400+ sq ft above grade), heated four-car garage, and rural setting suit professionals who can work remotely several days per week and want their daily environment to be the Foothills rather than a city office.
• The buyer ready to keep, rather than build. The single most expensive and time-consuming part of creating a property like this is the equestrian infrastructure: the arena, the barn, the fencing, the water systems, the shelters. Building those from raw land typically takes years and substantial six-figure investment. Here, all of that work is done.

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