Clear Directive

Teton Village homeowners told Ward|Blake Architects that they wanted a “substantive home.” The Jackson-based firm delivered.

When architects Tom Ward and Mitch Blake, who founded Ward|Blake in 1996, first met with a couple that had a Teton Village lot adjacent to the Bridger-Teton National Forest, they got an instruction they hadn’t heard before: “‘I want the house to be substantive, and that is why I hired you guys,’ the client told us,” Ward says. “In terms of client directive, that was about as clear as could be, and it kicked the whole design process off. It got the wheels of our entire staff going.”

With such instructions, it would have been easy for Ward and Blake to go right to log, but they didn’t. “It’s not that we’re anti-log; we’ve done log before,” Ward says. But, Ward admits, “log has been worked to death.” The architects also recognized that these clients were not “log people.” According to Blake, “[The husband] is very detail-oriented, and we knew he wouldn’t like having logs move around over time and joints opening up, or having bugs in the house.”

The result is a rigorously designed and executed home that is loglike but sits lightly on its site. It meets the client’s directive of being substantive but is not a ponderous mass. (Also, in the seven years since it was built, it hasn’t experienced any of the twisting or cracking that a log home would have.) “The materials palette allowed us to create a relationship between the spaces inside the house and the site,” Ward says. “There are areas where it feels like the site flows into the house, which adds a dynamism between the natural and built environment.” While a log house could have big doors to the outside, in this project, Ward|Blake was able to go beyond that and open the house so that the inside flows out into nature and nature flows inside the house.

If logs aren’t part of the home’s materials palette, what is? The exterior is board-formed concrete, stone, stainless steel, and clear cedar siding. Inside, there are exposed trusses made from hemlock, quarter-sawn oak floors, Venetian plaster, and steel. “We used heavy dimensional lumber,” Ward says. “Where there was too much exposed interior steel for the clients, we clad portions of it in wood.” The architects selected hemlock for the home’s interior because of its color. “It has an appearance like Douglas fir, but hemlock doesn’t oxidize to orange like Douglas fir does,” Ward says. “It keeps a mid-honey-amber tone. We were excited about the neutral richness of this color.”

Ward | Blake was named the 2013 Firm of the Year by the six-state American Institute of Architects’ Western Mountain Region and has won numerous International Design Awards.

The home isn’t only about aesthetics, though. “The clients also wanted it to be eminently livable,” Ward says. “The wife wanted a home where the grandkids could run around. The scale of the rooms was important to her; she wanted everything to be cozy.” Ward says, “Nothing is over the top, yet nothing is ordinary. Everything offers something to the occupant.”