Bozeman, Montana – April 28, 2020 – The just released 2020 HOME issue from Big Sky Journal is a beautiful tribute to the architects, builders, interior designers and artisans of the Northern Rockies who collectively create stunning, thoughtfully crafted homes. One of the magazine’s featured projects is a cabin-like compound in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, by JLF Architects that owes more to the region’s historic vernacular architecture than to the house’s setting on the edge of a golf course.
The architects’ innovative approach, laying out and connecting several structures, provides an intentional sense of arrival, privacy and remoteness for the residence and focuses the gaze on impressive mountain views to the south. While projecting the authentic rustic appeal of reclaimed timber exteriors and cedar-shake roofs, the design also embraces the elegance of clean, contemporary lines and materials including steel and expanses of glass.
Unlike a traditional cabin, daylight floods an open floor plan that suits the active homeowners’ lifestyle, and the house’s private spaces feature the refinement of plaster and wainscoting in contrast to more rugged wood textures in the main living area and kitchen. The compound’s structures include the main house, a guest house and an office-plus-retreat space for the husband, connected to the main house by way of a large glassy hallway with views of the Teton Mountains – an architectural feature that Big Sky Journal calls out as “a major ‘Aha!’ moment.”
“The home succeeds in balancing its different personas by establishing a strong sense of place through its materiality and authenticity,” writes Big Sky Journal. As John Lauman of JLF Architects tells the magazine, “We strive for truth in materials. If there’s log, it needs corners. If there’s stone veneer, the wall needs to be thick enough that it could be a stone wall.” In the great room, dramatic scissor trusses made of heavily distressed reclaimed materials combine with a massive stone fireplace and chinked log wall to provide context and character while demonstrating the masterful craftsmanship of JLF’s Design-Build partner Big-D Signature.
The trusses generate energy and celebrate the room’s volume while creating “a powerful architectural moment in the vaulted-ceilinged space,” writes the magazine. At the same time, the angular wooden forms act as a counterpoint to the expansive Snake River Mountain views. The serene kitchen is a wood-filled delight featuring Shaker-inspired fir cabinets, rustic reclaimed wood timbers and oak floors. The greenish-gray Pietra Cardosa countertops and pale aqua backsplash in glazed clay tile mirror the colors of nature seen through large windows that capture vistas of golf course and distant mountains.
Outside, the house connects to a shallow pond with soothing water features by Verdone Landscape Architects, accessed from the patio of the main house and the husband’s retreat space. For interiors, designer Jet Zarkadas of Los Griegos Studio in Santa Fe helped the homeowners achieve a balance of sophisticated simplicity and comfort that creates “a refined mountain elegance” while blending the family’s East Coast past with its New West present. In the husband’s retreat, Zarkadas introduced a bar area, cigar smoking accoutrements and animal mounts surrounding a stone fireplace for a personalized masculine feel.
