Paul Bertelli’s Inspirations

It seems Paul Bertelli was born with an eye for architecture. Growing up in Boston in the ‘50s, he got his start building makeshift treehouses and wooden forts in the forested area surrounding his childhood home. “We used twigs and sticks and pine needles to create these little play spaces,” he recalls. “It always came down to this idea of handmade; we didn’t have a tent to pitch but we’d make shelters out of what we found in the woods.” Decades later, this philosophy of working with authentic handcrafted materials and the native land has carried into Bertelli’s Bozeman-based firm JLF Architects, where his team of designers creates homes rooted in the vast Western landscape.