From Our Editor: Bringing the Outside In
Celebrating the extraordinary achievements of Mountain West builders despite the elements.
Portrait: Povy Atchison
Builders in the Mountain West are faced with myriad challenges more extreme than typical urban construction: whiteout conditions and temps that can drop to -30 F; winters that can last from September to June; building envelopes perched on cliffs or chiseled into mountainsides. Wildlife—bear, elk, moose and bison—wander through jobsites. Remote locations, sometimes hours away from the nearest town, entail long daily drives and the challenges of getting materials to the site. But as one builder told me, it’s all how you look at things.
His crew was amused when a bison meandered through camp—a potential challenge—instead considering the massive animal their site mascot for the day. And in the case of the remodeled Lake Tahoe cabin in this issue, the builder and design team turned something that could have been perceived as a problem into the home’s most surprising feature. The cabin had been built in the 1940s on Lake Tahoe’s North Shore around two gargantuan granite boulders.
Faced with what to do with the rocks, the design team decided that instead of pulverizing—or concealing—them, they would embrace them as an integral part of their design.“We had to get very creative,” builder Rand Carter of Sawtooth Builders says of the project. The result? The “boulder room” on the home’s lower level, a transition from upstairs to the downstairs media room, family room and bedrooms—and a great talking point for guests.
In this issue, we honor those intrepid individuals who make mountain homes a reality with our Top Mountain Builders List plus you’ll find the fruits of their labor throughout the issue, including beautiful homes—and some remarkable feats of construction—in Snowmass Village, Carbondale and Sun Valley. Spring is just around the corner, and we are all greatly anticipating the burst of color it will bring. When I lived in Jackson, my neighbor’s favorite spring greeting was, “Your bulbs up yet?” Hoping your bulbs are up!
Darla Worden
Editor in Chief
