IN THE BOOK: MODERN WEST
Just in time for holiday gift giving, writer Chase Reynolds Ewald and photographer Audrey Hall, the dynamic duo behind a growing list of beautiful books rooted in the West, have published their fourth coffee table offering. In Modern West (Gibbs Smith), they showcase 15 homes that evoke the recent evolution in Western design. Noting in the book’s introduction the “continuous pendulum swing between traditional rustic and modern rustic design,” as Western homes trend contemporary while continuing to respond thoughtfully to regional history and landscape, Ewald and Hall conclude, “The best work achieves a careful balance – between ruggedness and refinement, scale and subtlety, tradition and innovation.”
Here at JLF Architects we congratulate these talented women on another significant accomplishment and are honored that two of the book’s 15 featured homes are JLF and Big-D Signature design-build projects – including a radical remodel of a Park City house that appears as Modern West’s opening chapter, “Shoulder Season.”
“The house was enormous, and heavy, a panoply of massive logs resting atop oversized stone piers,” Ewald writes of the original condition of the Park City project we call Wasatch Range Revival. “Today the home has been transformed: the exterior simplified with wood lap siding and standing-seam metal roofs, rounded river rocks replaced with clean-edge Montana moss rock, the interior opened up with vaulted steel trusses, steel columns, and steel-and-glass window walls. Even more impactful,” the chapter continues, “was the reorientation of the layout. Now, dual axes create a central sight line to the Wasatch Mountains, establishing a strong sense of place from the moment of entry.”
As JLF principal Jake Scott tells Ewald, “The house had a lot of really heavy architecture: massive columns and a really big entry, and there wasn’t much openness to the outside. It needed to be lightened up.” Intended for the homeowners’ retirement, the scale also was all wrong. “With a big log stairway and thirty-inch columns, it had this massive mountain-home feel that didn’t fit their personalities,” he says. “The question became, how do we bring more timelessness of character, and how do we make it more comfortable for two people?” In one of many design decisions that enhance the connection to the outdoors, Scott switched the original order of kitchen and dining room, making the kitchen truly the heart of the home and adding contemporary window walls to both spaces to create a view all the way through to the outdoor fire pit area and mountains beyond.
JLF’s unparalleled design-build relationship with Big-D Signature is symbiotic and extends to professional partners such as Verdone Landscape Architects, who played an equally important role in fulfilling the homeowners’ empty-nest dream for this project, creating outdoor spaces as thoughtfully rich and layered as the new indoor ones. At the request of the wife – a swimmer, as is their daughter – a swimming pool was added, with a twist. From the house, it’s sheltered from view by a stacked Alaskan yellow cedar retaining wall to prevent seeing an unsightly pool cover in winter months. Meanwhile, the wall, marked with spillways that splash into a pond-like channel below, offers delightful movement and sound to the outdoor dining and entertaining space off the kitchen.
As the homeowners tell Modern West, “When we moved here full time, we were empty nesters; ninety percent of the time it’s just two people and a dog. But we wanted a space where, when our kids come back, there would be room for everybody. The architects transformed the exterior, then put glass and steel through the center of house so you can see from front to back. They turned a house that was clunky, dark and overbearing into one that’s welcoming.”
