In this paper we study the geometric structure of affine Deligne–Lusztig varieties $$X_{\lambda }(b)$$
X
λ
(
b
)
for $$\textrm{GL}_n$$
GL
n
and b basic. Motivated by Görtz and He (Camb J Math 3:323–353, 2015) and Chan and Ivanov (Math Ann 380:1801–1890, 2021), we consider a new condition on $$\lambda $$
λ
. If this is satisfied, then $$X_{\lambda }(b)$$
X
λ
(
b
)
is the disjoint union of classical Deligne–Lusztig varieties times finite-dimensional affine spaces.