Designed as a year-round residence, the family desired a home that would be respectful of its natural setting and facilitate ease of movement between indoor and outdoor spaces. The resulting building takes maximum advantage of the views and utilizes local building materials in innovative and sustainable ways. Located just outside Vail, the house is sited facing south over a manmade pond with spectacular views of the surrounding Gore Range and New York Mountains. A modern interpretation of the prevalent mountain lodge vocabulary, the project is a response to the oversized log cabins that characterize many Colorado resort towns.
The building is arranged around a central courtyard as a series of one-story pavilions dedicated to specific functions, punctuated by a three-story tower which houses the family bedrooms. Internal circulation is organized along the perimeter of the courtyard with the living spaces opening directly from the corridor. Exterior walls of floor-to-ceiling glass, shaded by horizontal brises-soleils to protect from solar gain, provide ample natural light and constant views –either of the wider landscape or the more intimate courtyard. At 12,000sf the house is substantial but feels more modest with the non-monolithic distribution of program.
The scale is further broken down by articulating each pavilion and elevation with distinct materials. The north entrance façade with its vertical log-pole siding preserves the privacy of the house, while the glass south façade opens to a long terrace and pond. The pavilions arrayed around the courtyard are clad in horizontally stacked beetle kill pine wood; a wood that is typically used as scrap but is given a new life here in a façade of exacting detail.
Cooper, a commonly used local material is elevated to a new level of precision. It is used extensively in the building as a roofing material as well as siding for the 3-story tower and the living room pavilion. The sloped roofs along the north and east, and the covered portion of the courtyard, are sheathed with site-assembled 12-inch-wide standing seam, full-length copper panels. The corners required custom field fabrication to achieve the “stitching” of the outside corners while the roof panels were fabricated from copper coils and upon installation, were treated with potash to achieve the rich dark patina.
The house is anchored on a stone plinth. A floating stepped wooden deck allows access to the water’s edge from the south-facing terrace. An outdoor living space between the living room and the library is shaded by a pergola of cedar beams connecting the two, and features a two-sided fireplace. A narrow path from the southwest corner of the stone plinth leads to a slant-roofed gazebo at the pond.
A great deal of care was taken to build with a minimum of disturbance to the site’s natural vegetation and to provide an orientation favorable to passive solar heating. In addition, remotely located solar panels offset the building’s energy consumption. The landscaping is discreet and based entirely on indigenous chaparral vegetation, so as to ground the house in its natural surrounding.
