DESIGN ELEMENT: PATIO PERFECTION
Photo by Audrey Hall
If there’s one part of a home that speaks to a connection with the outdoors, it’s the patio. With JLF Architects’ place-based design approach that respects the natural surroundings of a house, it’s no surprise that patios – whether for private family escapes or entertaining – are an essential part of its architectural prescription for relaxed living in the Mountain West. Done right, expansive views and an intimate setting can go hand-in-hand, as in the landscaping for the Park City, Utah, remodel known as Wasatch Range Revival (above) that Mountain Living magazine called an “open-air delight.”
Photos by Audrey Hall
To create the house’s series of “outdoor rooms,” Verdone Landscape Architects (VLA) worked with design-build partners JLF and Big-D Signature, incorporating aspen trees to offer shade and hold LED downlights for evening moonlight ambience – as well as to add “human scale,” according to VLA principal Brannon Bleggi. A swimming pool (above right), built above eye level as viewed from the back of the house, transitions smoothly into the surrounding meadowland and is invisible from the fire pit seating area off the home’s kitchen (above left). A stacked Alaskan yellow cedar retaining wall conceals the pool while helping define and protect patio spaces, with the flow of water from scuppers in the wall bringing movement and sound.
Photo by Lucy Call
The simple process of crossing from one patio area to another over the “floating” concrete walkways of another Park City project, known as Park City Modern, is a relaxing communion with nature. Also a JLF/Big-D Signature design-build collaboration with VLA, the home’s outdoor features include multiple mining sluice box-style waterfalls – a nod to the region’s history – that channel a stream into the walking-on-water courtyard. Spillways between the clean-lined slabs heighten the effect, while the overall design’s bold perpendicular elements echo the glass-and-steel grid of the windows. Although the patio’s clean, concrete design is decidedly modern, it’s softened with rustic materials including deconstructed fieldstone walls – conceived by design principal Paul Bertelli to resemble ruins of a historical structure crumbling over time – and native plants that ease it into the landscape.
Photo by Audrey Hall
This woodland fantasy at the forest’s edge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, (above) is an outdoor living room for a JLF-designed house that Bertelli calls a “reinterpreted New England antique.” The irregularly shaped patio and wandering stone paths feel organic to the site while embracing views of Teton peaks through the conifers. Surrounded by 100 acres of conservation-protected lands and a nearby cattle ranch, the quiet, woody ambience is replete with solitude. The adjacent screened-in summer house features another JLF-designed take on outdoor living – for al fresco dining and with a fireplace for quiet nights or a mid-day hideaway.
Photo by Audrey Hall
While JLF Architects is best-known for its design of legacy houses throughout the Mountain West, the firm’s projects extend across the country, including for this house on a private lake (above) in Tennessee, where layered patio areas are linked by footbridges and rustic stone steps that appear as if tumbled there by nature. Here, too, the patios connect to a separate summer house structure, in this case one that actually extends out over the lake, using a proprietary pier construction process that JLF innovated specifically for the project.
