Search Results for: elements of architecture

From the general layout of your home to the smallest structural details, every aspect of its architecture reflects who you are and how you want to live. Evolving and expanding over the years, home design in Jackson Hole now offers homeowners a wide range of styles and approaches. We asked several of the valley’s leading architects to describe their favorite design elements. The answers are as diverse as they are insightful.

Berlin ARchitects

Larry Berlin

My favorite architectural element is light. Throughout the design process, I visualize how light will enter a space—defining and refining textures, materials, color and the volume of the space. Light interplays with positive and negative space and transparency. For me, it is the source and inspiration for all subsequent architectural creativity.

CLB ARCHITECTS

Andy Ankeny

As a native of the West, I like to create buildings that are inherently simple and cohesive, honoring the area’s vernacular architecture with a modern sense of scale and proportion. I am inspired by the relationship between built forms and their natural surroundings, and believe that good architecture is inseparable from and enhances sense of place.

Design Associates architects

Chris Lee

Something we’re doing a lot these days that’s had a significant impact on architecture is using larger windows and more glass. We’ve always worked to bring the outside in, and new advances in window technology are facilitating that now more than ever. The resulting architecture is more open, light and airy.

FARMER PAYNE ARCHITECTS

JAMIE FARMER + SCOTT PAYNE

The most important design trend involves integrating knowledge and technology to create smarter and healthier designs. Our designs focus on improving health and quality of life while reducing the carbon footprint. Today, wellness is a priority in any built environment. Energy consumption and waste are being approached more intelligently, too.

JLF ARCHITECTS

PAUL BERTELLI, LOGAN LEACHMAN + ASHLEY SULLIVAN

The kitchen is the central gathering space where connection and growth are nurtured. Nature provides inspiration, as it is constantly evolving and working to sustain life. Glass curtain walls are key transparent components in developing the relationship between interior and exterior environments. We strive to enhance the human condition through an interconnection of these two environments.

Tillemans architect

Lori Tillemans

I’m excited about the element of surprise: teasing the mind with unexpected material combinations and/or proportions. How can that roof work without apparent structural support? Who thought a small window in a large stone wall would be okay? Why should a fireplace appear to be floating? Just for fun!

Vera iconica Architecture

veronica Schreibeis smith

Beautiful design can be more than skin deep. We love integrating into our designs the latest science on how the built environment impacts human and planetary well-being. The ultimate goal is to co-create designs with our clients that will enhance their cognitive performance, vitality and longevity.

A43 architecture

chris jAubert

Well-designed stairs have always caught my eye, and I appreciate the harmony of form and function they bring to interiors. Much like a great piece of furniture, stairs can be both sculptural and purposeful. They often present technical challenges so, as an architect, you are always looking for creative ways to both satisfy constraints and feature this architectural element.

Dubbe moulder ARchitects

Kurt dubbe + chris Moulder

The notion of shelter derives from the three fundamental Vitruvian principles of good architecture: firmness—to design shelter with care, thoughtfulness and durability; commodity—to design shelter that accommodates its users’ needs and desires; and delight—to design shelter that is beautiful, timeless and memorable.

Kinsey architects

Cornelius kinsey

Jackson Hole homes require large structural elements to support the weight of our winters’ heavy snow loads. For local architects, this is an opportunity to use structural elements creatively to design interesting details and spaces. Beams and columns, for example, become picture frames for the valley’s spectacular outside views.

PROGRESSIVE DESIGN IN GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK

The relationship between an experience and its memory is strong. Traveling down a narrow path, sunlight filtering through the trees, gravel crunching underfoot, the smell of pine sap. The anticipation of the journey and the satisfaction of the destination. For those of us who have had the pleasure to explore the national parks, a memory such as this lives in the subconscious waiting for the right catalyst to bring it forward.

“Visiting the park is a journey; there is a sense of exploration,” says Chris Baxter, principal architect of Baxter Design Studio. “Our architecture has always been about the experience and procession of the user.” Paramount to this approach Baxter Design Studio mindfully plots the way people move through the site and structure. Upon one’s arrival to the property, the experience becomes guided by the designers.

Over the past 20 years, the firm has designed 10 projects within park inholdings. The BDS team strives for the structures they design to be in unison with the wild Wyoming environment. “We love to think of our projects as landscape architecture—the form of the landscape happens to include a building,” Baxter says. When building amid pristine beauty, BDS exhibits restraint. “It is our responsibility to minimize the impact the building has on its surroundings.”

By approaching each structure as a feature within the environment, the architects consider their practice within the lineage of “park architecture,” referencing texts such as an architecture manual published by the National Parks Association in the 1930s. “As we look at these historical values in relation to our modern architecture, it’s surprising what remains relevant,” Baxter says.

“Modern architecture is oftentimes perceived as cold. We are motivated to create a rich experience for people as they interact with our buildings and the natural environment.”

The studio views “modern park architecture” as a new typology conceived by the synthesis
of natural influences and advanced building technologies. Each design, in its simplest form, is a quiet viewing pavilion: a comfortable place to observe wildlife, the subtle changes of light throughout the day, and the transition of seasons. As these structures configure to their natural context, BDS seeks opportunities to develop connections between interior spaces and their natural surroundings.

Scale and proportion in their work are also rooted in the landscape. Similar to the way historic buildings found their scale from site-harvested materials, BDS utilizes the scale and proportion inherent to the site. Materials are approached in a similar fashion: The studio finds direction from the site to utilize materials that become unified with their locale.

Recent commissions have found the firm migrating into town, sites that offer slightly different “inputs” and yet reference the same nature-informed ideals. Whether proximate to town or park, a home must enhance the experience of the property and its natural attributes. In an ultimate nod to the site, Baxter considers the firm’s designs as a contextualization of modern architecture within iconic landscapes.

When space, emotion and environment coalesce, architecture becomes art, and the affect is limitless—as felt by the people who experience such inspired spaces. This concept was truly vanguard when Mexican architect Luis Barragán so astutely articulated it decades ago—and remains so today.

“Architecture is an art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well-being.” -Luis Barragán

Art as architecture as wellness: This is the core dynamic driving the new partnership between aesthetic visionaries Jackson, Wyoming-based Veronica Schreibeis Smith and Lima, Peru-based Luis Longhi, who have joined continental forces; Longhi is the inaugural guest resident at Vera Iconica Architecture. Together, the two talents are trailblazing an international movement toward mindful design: mindful of people, of nature, of cultural heritage and of material integrity. Intuition anchors their design process—the insight based on instinct, experience and creativity. When layered with the practical and the rational, says Schreibeis Smith, the result is “functional, smart spaces that have soul.”

Case in point, the architects’ inaugural collaboration: Pachacamac, a ridgeline refuge built for a Peruvian philosopher. True to the philosopher’s intellect, the residence grows from his library, starting with a central courtyard carved into the hillside, open to the sky. On either side, the library’s wings stretch east and west, spanning the sun’s daily arc, in deference to Peru’s vibrant mythology, symbolic of earthen knowledge extending out to eternity. The house unfolds from this intimate library into more social spaces. “As the program of the house involves more people, it becomes light and more open, culminating in a glass-cube living room to gather guests,” says Longhi.

“We believe that every person should live in a masterpiece,” the architects say in their vision statement. “And beyond that, we believe that every person deserves to have a home that is not only beautiful, but one that enhances their well-being and quality of life on a daily basis. We define a masterpiece as something that moves our clients, inspires them and elevates them—a work of art, a piece of music, a shared conversation. Essentially, we design experiences. Architecture just happens to be our medium.”

Schreibeis Smith and Longhi draw daily inspiration from the nature that surrounds them—she in the Tetons and he on the Altiplano Plateau. “In these places of soaring beauty, we find not only architectural inspiration, but also inspiration on what it means for a life to be lived well,” Schreibeis Smith explains. “To us, that means homes that are designed for wellness and to communicate with the surrounding landscape, designed with local materials, and always in respect for the environment.”

Vera Iconica wants its clients to feel as elevated as their surroundings, attuned to nature and their true natures. Ultimately, the firm’s goal is “to design spaces where our clients derive joy and experience a life of meaning, in beauty”—a benchmark that circles back once again to Barragán and his profound eloquence: “Beauty is the oracle that speaks to us all.”

With experience comes courage—courage to push boundaries, to meld new ideas with time-tested fundamentals, to start trends rather than follow them. Since 1996, Ward + Blake Architects has embodied such courage, integrating structural quality, livability and energy efficiency into a holistic design approach that builds homes to last—and to delight.

One of the first characteristics you’ll notice about a Ward + Blake home is the way it blends organically with its natural surroundings. “You can see the layout of the building is pretty much hand-in-glove with what the land is telling us,” says architect Tom Ward. “Basic site analysis starts with topography and ends with orientation.” Factors like wind, precipitation, storm-advancement corridors and solar orientation all play a role.

Roof overhangs and other building components manage sun exposure, allowing the home to “respond slowly to seasonal changes, rather than suddenly being sweltering in summer or cool in the wintertime.”

“If we address fundamental principles like that, when we start applying technology to heating and cooling a home, the demands on the structure become a little easier and less odious,” Ward continues. The caliber of today’s architectural tools is remarkable, he adds. “One of the biggest things is windows and doors. The ones we’re putting in homes these days are so airtight, if you inverted the houses and put them in Jackson Lake, they’d float!”

Installing high-tech systems like a ground-source heat pump, which extracts latent heat from the earth, reduces energy consumption significantly.

“Energy conservation is an important part of the equation, but the livable environment is too,” he says. Today’s homes are sealed so tightly that they trap in unhealthy air pollutants, such as upholstery off-gasses. To rectify this problem, Ward + Blake installs energy recovery units, which pull domestic air out while bringing fresh air in from outside, exchanging the heat from the former to the latter in the process, so there’s no drop in room temperature. This, combined with humidity control, makes a home healthier and more comfortable for its occupants.

Another design element that Ward + Blake employs with great passion is materiality. For example, its architects consider traditional materials, such as wood and stone, in new and different ways. After experiencing extremely volatile winters like this past one, which brought sudden, dramatic temperature swings, “you start to gain appreciation for more traditional materials that have stood the test of time,” Ward says.

The Ward + Blake team also creates a balanced, pleasing feel in homes by using materials with contrasting textures and colors that aren’t typically used together: rough-cut rustic slate and polished Carrara marble; board-formed concrete and hand-milled cedar siding; manipulated and shaped native fir logs next to concrete and cedar. Ward explains, “When you juxtapose some materials against each other, they both look better and they bring inherent characteristics of each material more to the fore.”

Together, all of these elements form a veritable whole—a long-lasting, energy-efficient home that both comforts and delights.

RENOVATIONS USUALLY AREN’T LESS EXPENSIVE THAN BUILDING NEW, AT LEAST IN JACKSON HOLE, BUT THEY’RE INCREASING IN POPULARITY AND OFFER THEIR OWN REWARDS.

These days, and for several years now, “remodel” in Jackson Hole isn’t something done to a bathroom, or a kitchen. “Five years ago, remodel projects were smaller, but today’s remodels can be 5,000-square-feet or more,” says architect Shawn Ankeny, who founded her eponymous firm in 2005. “Clients want their entire homes redone.”

It’s not just the scope of renovations that is growing, but also the number of them. “When we started, we were doing about 20 percent remodels,” says Rush Jenkins, creative director and co-owner, with his partner and COO Klaus Baer, of WRJ Design, a firm that was founded in 2003 in Manhattan and moved to Jackson in 2010. “Now about 40 percent of our projects are remodels. This is a trend I do not see slowing down in Jackson Hole.”

You can fix a house, but you can’t make land appear.
— Alison Price West, architect

A main factor driving both the increase in remodels and the size of them is that “there is just so little vacant land available now,” says Rob DesLauriers, a real estate broker in the valley since 2003 (and an associate broker with Sotheby’s since 2011). Architect Alison Price of Price West Studio says, “You can fix a house, but you can’t make land appear.” Like WRJ, Price has seen an increase in the number of renovations—versus new builds—her firm does; she estimates 85 percent of her current projects are remodels.

Land has always been scarce in Jackson Hole—because of the national parks and forests that make this valley the special place it is, only 3 percent of the land in Teton County is privately owned. “And a lot of that is over [Teton Pass] in Teton Valley, in Alta,” DesLauriers says. (Alta is in Teton County, but not in Jackson Hole.) “There’s no doubt the inventory of property for sale is scarcer now than it has been,” Jenkins says. DesLauriers says that there are 10 or fewer vacant lots in Teton Village and “all but one or two are owned by the adjacent homeowner to protect their views and privacy.” These homeowners have little desire to sell their extra land. “They’ll either sell their house first and then sell the land, or sell the two together. You have to buy the house so that you can get the vacant land,” DesLauriers says.

It can be difficult to look past the brown, log, or heavy timber, but a great team—an architect, interior designer, and builder—can create a totally new feeling in a log house.
— Jesse Roy, Couloir Construction

Teton Village isn’t alone in its scarcity of lots. “There are very few land subdivision opportunities now, and, in the older subdivisions, the best lots were taken early and built on in the late 80s, 90s, or early 2000s,” DesLauriers says. But these homes built 20 to 30 years ago, while they do sit on the best properties in their neighborhoods, have an aesthetic and flow—a materials palette heavy on log and wood and a compartmentalized layout—that doesn’t resonate with families today. “Tastes have changed in the past five years, never mind the past 20 or 30,” Jenkins says.

Homeowners want these prime locations, but “they want their homes to be open, brighter, and airier than the log homes popular 20 years ago are,” West says. “A majority of people are here to bring the outside in. They want to feel connected to nature and have their views. Many older homes were not designed to live this way.” But they can be made to. Jesse Roy, owner of Couloir Construction, which does new building and renovations, says it can be difficult to “look past the brown, log, or heavy timber, but a great team—an architect, interior designer, and builder—can create a totally new feeling in a log house.” But this does require a big commitment and investment.

“Renovations should not be done piecemeal, because once you refresh one room, the rest look outdated,” Jenkins says. “I always say, let’s dive in and do it all. It may seem overwhelming at first, but clients are always thrilled in the end.” While not all designers agree with him (see sidebar), they—along with builders and architects—do agree that surprises are inevitable in every remodel. “In any renovation, no matter how many existing drawings you have, there will be surprises,” West says. Builder Roy says, “We can speculate what’s behind a wall, or even have drawings telling us what is supposed to be behind a wall, but until you’re in it, you don’t really know what’s really there.” West has found unexpected water pipes and opened up a wall to find a duct that wasn’t shown on drawings. “Some houses have a tremendous amount of surprises, and some have less,” she says. “But they all have some.”

But not all surprises are bad: Jenkins and Baer remodeled their own East Jackson home; following their own advice, they “dove in and did it all.” When the vinyl siding was ripped off the exterior, a historic log cabin was revealed. “We had no idea there was this
fabulous log cabin inside our house,” Jenkins says. “We had to rethink our plan, and it was expensive to keep the cabin, but the amount of charm and warmth and history of that cabin—I wouldn’t change a single thing in our decision to renovate and save the cabin and
to rebuild the house around it. It wasn’t easy, but it was very, very well worth it.”

Jenkins makes a point: Interior designer Jacque Jenkins-Stireman (no relation to WRJ’s Rush Jenkins) says, “There is something about the coziness of log that you can’t get from another material.” She says her favorite projects apply a modern aesthetic to an outdated log home and result in “a beautiful, open, light, and bright home that still has the cozy properties of log. To me, that’s the best of both worlds.” Ankeny says many of her renovation projects include an aspect that is new, like a guest home or an addition to the existing home. “I love projects that involve reconciling new construction with existing,” she says. “It’s a fun and creative challenge to figure out how we are going to marry the two. Maybe you end up making the existing house look more like the new, or maybe you do the opposite. Either way, the end result is a building that is more interesting than its individual parts.” Jenkins-Stireman says, “Renovations can be a challenge, but they also present possibilities that sometimes just aren’t achievable with new construction.”

Ward | Blake Architects’ vision is clear: to sensitively, sustainably and artistically design homes and buildings that are integral with their locations. Principal Tom Ward says, “At Ward | Blake, we eschew traditional form for organic form. At building sites, we study the view corridors, orientation to the sun and natural contours of the land to design and situate structures. The result is a tangible relationship with the site, and it is an architectural process we can use anywhere in the world.”

Founded in Jackson in 1996, Ward | Blake has been designing custom homes, schools, places of worship and commercial buildings throughout the intermountain West. From the beginning, Tom Ward and Mitch Blake have used a bio-climatically responsible approach. From their lifelong study of architecture, they use fundamental design methods to assure sensitivity to the surrounding environment. They consider how much sun will penetrate the building, which naturally warms and lights its rooms. They study the thermal envelope so that they can reduce heating and cooling of buildings. They ask how large roof overhangs should be to provide shelter from weather. They select building materials that will withstand UV penetration, intense storms and extreme temperatures.

ANYTHING WE HAVE DESIGNED IN OUR PARTNERSHIP IS SUCH THAT IT WILL WITHSTAND TIME AND THE ELEMENTS.
—TOM WARD, WARD | BLAKE

That is not to say that function trumps form. There is beauty in all of Ward | Blake’s work. Tom Ward says that they operate with three pillars of architecture—as art and science—at the forefront: A building must be firm, commodious and delightful. Ward says, “When you enter any home that we have designed, we want an emotional reaction, one of excitement. The place needs to be cool.”

When Ward | Blake opened their firm, Jackson Hole was replete with Old West-style log homes. The principals, nevertheless, insisted on modernist approaches. Mitch Blake says, for instance, “We were among the first in Jackson to integrate sod roofs into homes. The sod allows the house to blend with its surroundings, and it is a beautiful and practical application of sustainability.” The turf changes shades with the seasons, so a home looks different from early spring to summer through autumn. Additionally, sod roofs act as a thermal mass and they slow run- off, which reduces erosion from the soil below the drip line.

Tom Ward and Mitch Blake design buildings to last and to a lovely aesthetic. Ward says, “Anything we have designed in our partnership is such that it will withstand time and the elements. And, we assure that it will have been artfully crafted.”