00:00When we're starting a project, especially a house, we always are starting with the site.
00:10In this project, we were able to take this incredibly dramatic natural landscape and then
00:17within it, create this home that has a very direct sense of place and warmth.
00:25We always like to build in different places because we learn in every different environment.
00:29I'm a city kid.
00:31This is the first time I've built an elevation of 8,400 feet above sea level.
00:34Understanding how to deal with snow and 50 mile per hour winds and what happens at the
00:39altitude is really interesting.
00:42We've kept the lightness and airiness and taught clean lines of modernism, but the way that
00:49we've enveloped ourselves in the materiality and the textures and the colors of this house
00:53have gotten us really excited about creating more dynamic spaces.
00:58I think a lot of the collaborators we work with to kind of create different finishes or textures
01:03has been interesting to make the spaces warmer within the overall idea of what we're trying
01:08to do for the building.
01:09And somehow it makes the spaces really responsive.
01:12Here we are at our project Cowboy Heaven in the mountains of Montana.
01:23We're standing at the kind of the front entrance to the house and we wanted it to feel kind
01:28of like a small cabin, not to take up too much real estate within the property.
01:33It's a bit of an illusion because as you move around the house, it expands into the landscape,
01:37opening the house up to the views beyond.
01:40The wood that you see on the exterior of the house is shashugiban, which is a charred wood,
01:45which is a kind of traditional Japanese technique for finishing and weather protecting.
01:51The snow, if it's like dusting lightly, it collects in every single little crevice of the weave
01:57and creates this like incredibly delicate filigree.
02:02And then once the wind blows, it's gone.
02:05You could consider this the back of the house because the entrance is on the other side.
02:11One of the materials we use throughout the house is silver cloud granite, which you can see here
02:16forming the base of the building, as well as all of the landscape elements.
02:21Later on, you'll see how it's used throughout the house on the inside.
02:24This patio or terrace area is built with a kind of almost like Lego blocks built into the landscape.
02:31But these are two to five thousand pound blocks of stone that are very carefully placed with
02:37incredible masons who used a crane and large suction cups to place each one next to each other.
02:43And it took about a day to get two to three boulders placed.
02:47The nature of how we've created the exterior spaces is very elemental.
02:53You've got the rugged stone, you've got the mountain air, and then you juxtapose against
02:59the snow and the water elements like the hot tubs with these moments of fire.
03:05I think all of that is very satisfying on a human level.
03:11We're in the living room, which is part of the main family gathering space at Cowboy Heaven.
03:16One of the great things about the boomerang is that it allows us to capture multiple views,
03:21one of the main mountain peaks and then the other down out through the valley towards Ennis,
03:27which is this beautiful distance view where the layering of the landscape kind of unfolds
03:31to the valley beyond.
03:32Many of the interior surfaces are influenced by the exterior and the landscape beyond,
03:39and this wall was influenced by the lodgepole pines that scatter at the upper part of the mountain up here.
03:49It was really important for us to use all materials that are non-toxic,
03:52so linseed oil was kind of our go-to finish for a lot of the wood that you'll see in the house.
03:58One of the goals here was to capture a feeling of serenity by using as few materials as we could
04:06in very different manners, so you'll see a lot of this silver cloud granite.
04:13We chose it because it's got this really beautiful patterning that, in a way, evokes snowdrifts.
04:20What's great about it is it's got a little bit of mica in it, so at night it kind of sparkles like a night sky,
04:26and so we kind of love that kind of very delicate moment.
04:33The base of the fireplace is soapstone, and we wanted it to be structured similar to the boulders
04:38that are in the landscape outside.
04:39The fireplace hood itself is a bent piece of steel, and we rolled it to give that nice radius at the bottom.
04:46There's multiple layers of steel hoods within there, so the outside hood stays nice and cool,
04:51where the heat goes in the inside, so you have a protective layer.
04:55There's an amazing amount of engineering that needed to happen to have such a large open fire within a wood structure.
05:02There are just so many instances where we've taken these limitations and turned them into moments for inventiveness.
05:08It's what we love to do.
05:10And it's really important for us to find ways of softening the transition from inside to outside.
05:16We did that with the ceiling here to kind of invoke the feeling of kind of being within the snowdrift,
05:22making it very thin and just kind of float and be quite light above us.
05:26You'll notice that the light fixtures are all very unique.
05:37Our client loves finding things all over the world and bringing them into her house.
05:43For instance, this beautiful handcrafted chandelier.
05:48Working with the artist for this fixture was wonderful.
05:50It was literally a hands-on experience in her workshop, and it also kind of mimicked the mountains beyond.
05:57We're standing next to what we call the blue pantry.
06:00We kind of think of it as the hinge of the space.
06:02As you kind of enter the space from the foyer, it doesn't allow you to see the whole view until you kind of move around it,
06:08and then the view kind of presents itself to you quite slowly.
06:11The hinge for us is getting back to kind of the lodgepole pines out in the forest,
06:18and kind of when thinking about when you're moving through the woods,
06:20there's kind of that layering of kind of larger trees to thinner ones beyond.
06:24It makes it a really interesting mass instead of just a big, solid thing,
06:28and it allows us to be really creative with how we incorporated the sound system.
06:34In about 2007 or maybe 2008, Devin started talking about us creating our own firm.
06:43And I remember one time saying, oh, we're going to have a firm together?
06:47And he said, it's what we've always dreamed of.
06:51Fast forward, I think that Devin was completely right.
06:54I mean, don't get us wrong.
06:57We have learned that boundaries are very important when you live and you work together.
07:01Even though we might do projects kind of separately,
07:05we're constantly learning from each other about how the other person's doing that project.
07:09And something that Faith might be doing in one project
07:12is kind of influencing something that I'm doing in another project.
07:16This is an endeavor that's given our whole life meaning,
07:19shaped the way we raised our kids.
07:21So being an architect and being a couple that likes to make things,
07:25every birthday party for both of our boys turned into kind of an all-day event.
07:29So we would spend the week before building obstacle courses in the backyard
07:32and planning out the different events that happened within that.
07:35And they became neighborhood almost block parties.
07:38It was wonderful because we brought people from the community together
07:41to celebrate this wonderful day for us.
07:44And we got to be with everyone that we knew.
07:46And it was really fun.
07:47Yeah.
07:47These parties or raising our kids or all of it, it's a project.
07:51And we're always developing that project.
07:53We're always being architects and it's the way that we think and we operate.
07:57And so we're always architecting.
08:03So now we're in the kitchen, which is the other side of the boomerang.
08:06And behind me is the hinge again.
08:08But on this side, we have kind of our pizza oven and wood storage and the island in front.
08:14And it really is the center of the house.
08:16Multiple pizzas come out of that oven after a day of skiing.
08:19And so it's a great place because you're standing here with everyone looking out at the mountains
08:23and feeling your legs from the day of skiing.
08:26It's a great spot.
08:27Another material that was very important to us was zinc.
08:30And we wanted to find a way to create a texture within that material that would work with the overall project.
08:36Within a conversation I had with our mill worker, Gata Vasso,
08:40he was telling me about the summer cabin where he grew up.
08:44And his mom would constantly making him and his friend's lemonade out of this zinc sink.
08:49And he was talking about this beautiful kind of pattern that would happen from the lemons and the lemonade.
08:55And so we started talking about that and trying to figure out ways how can we recreate that.
08:59We've worked for months with many different techniques of pouring lemon and splashing lemon
09:05and wrapping lemons into different fabrics and things.
09:09This counter is a lava stone with a glaze on it.
09:13We have collaborated for years with a woman in Denmark who applies ceramic glazes to lava stone.
09:22Because it's a natural process, you never know how it's going to turn out.
09:27This color is a really unique color for us within the house.
09:30And it may be a unique color in the world.
09:33So we're standing on the top floor.
09:38There's two very different window kind of moments here.
09:41We get a moment where we get the exterior texture that becomes part of the interior.
09:46So you're seeing the richness and character of the burnt wood exterior of siding.
09:50The other moment at the stair landing is a small window.
09:54Sometimes the small windows have more of an impact than even the big ones.
09:57Because you get these kind of beautiful picturesque postcard moments.
10:00Like in the morning, you get a great view of the sunrise as you're heading down for coffee.
10:08Now we're in the primary bedroom where we wanted to capture the views of the peaks beyond.
10:13So the shapes of the windows follow the shape of the volume of the building up here.
10:17This structure was influenced by the cabins that are off in the hills just beyond.
10:23The rooms up here are a different scale than down below.
10:28They're cozier and more intimate.
10:29One of the things that really amps up the coziness of these upper spaces are the fireplaces that each room has.
10:37This one is set within an alcove, the shape of which sort of reflects and responds to the furnishings.
10:44We're using sculpture and shape to sort of bring in a little playfulness into these spaces.
10:50Each of the fireplaces is slightly different and they all have surrounds that relate to the room that they're in.
10:57For instance, there's one down the hall.
10:59Which was a great fireplace.
11:01It came from France and we were originally thinking of kind of embedding it in a wall, how it was originally supposed to be designed.
11:08But we loved kind of the rusticness of it and it kind of felt like this beautiful found object or a car part.
11:15There's one room in this house that is one of Devin's favorites.
11:18I think it's an idea that's been in his mind for a long time.
11:21The bunk room that's in the lower level.
11:23I love bunk rooms because you're kind of creating little houses within the house.
11:27As you enter the bunk room, you walk down kind of this long hall and at the end of that is a large pivot door that's the same width as the hall and the same height as the ceiling.
11:38And that door opens out to a terrace and kind of amphitheater where all the kids can go.
11:43There's a large fire pit for them to kind of play and do s'mores and just have another connection to the outside.
11:48In the bunk room, we've created kind of these distinct little spaces and to kind of separate them, there are a couple of screens that we've added little blocks of wood to kind of create a dappled light effect.
12:02So now we're in the primary bathroom, which is this luscious room in part because of the finishes.
12:10Again, we're seeing the made-a-mono tile, the lava stone with the ceramic glaze.
12:16You can see here, they're really the difference in the glazes.
12:21I don't know exactly how many glazes there are.
12:23She's gone up to 16 or 24 levels of glaze.
12:27It makes for this really beautiful variation between each tile that also gives a sort of richness and dynamism to the space.
12:36The soaking tub is made of copper.
12:38One of the reasons for that is because copper retains heat for a longer period of time.
12:43So when you're in there for 40 minutes and you're really soaking with water up to your shoulders, it retains the heat.
12:49But it also works great with kind of the depth of color of the tile on the room and becomes kind of this beautiful isolated moment within this large kind of spa shower.
13:00This is the only spot in the house where we've used copper because it's a special moment.
13:04One of the things about this house that we think is the most fun is that you can just ski right in and right out.
13:14There's a ski trail that curves around the side of the house so you can just peel off and ski right into this space,
13:20which is where you can sort of take off all of your gear, get it all warm while you go upstairs and have lunch.
13:26In the ski room, we thought about how the materials could really help you use the space.
13:31The floor, we used the same stone, but we decided to cut it into small 4x4 blocks so there's more kind of grit.
13:38So you come in with, you know, slippery boots.
13:40You've got a little bit more traction.
13:42So adjacent to the bunk room is a space we call the bag room, and that's what it's for.
13:48It's got a whole bunch of cubbies, 12 of them, to put your suitcase and then a drawer below to put all your belongings in it.
13:54And then we match that same kind of idea of the cabinet for the bags, but in the bathroom so everyone has a special location to put all of their bathroom necessities.
14:08It's really interesting to come back to a project after it's been done and spend some time in it.
14:13It's something I feel like all architects really need to do is kind of spend time in the buildings they design because they kind of, they get away from you.
14:20They become their own thing.
14:21We're so used to looking at photographs of architecture, but in reality, architecture is not static.
14:28It's all about movement and moving through spaces.
14:31If you're thinking about a person within a space, their relationship to the space is always shifting as they move through it.
14:39So that's something we think about all the time.
14:41It's a very mindful act.
14:44And I think that's something that we've learned from here and from these clients and that we're really excited to move forward with.
Comments