From Our Editor: Respect for Place

A note from Mountain Living's Editor in Chief, Darla Worden.

12 hours ago

Darla Worden,

Portrait: Povy Atchison

“There should always be a respect for place,” Thinktank Design’s Erik Nelson says about a home he designed in Bozeman, Montana. That point of view permeates the stories in this issue.

Katy and Rick Jacobson looked for an architect to help them build a new home on a very special site: land in the Wawona district of Yosemite National Park that had been in Katy’s family since 1954. Architect Dan Wickline spent a lot of time on the site and in the park “getting a sense of the materiality of the place,” ultimately selecting dark wood siding to camouflage the home and settle it into the environment. “What Dan came up with was beyond our imagination,” Katy says.

Award-winning architectural designer, lecturer, author, and principal of studioryker, Lori Ryker, believes architects need to “expand our role as leaders and teachers of a better way to live on Earth.” Designing her own home, page 102, she first fell in love with the land and its native forest, meadow and creek—ideal wildlife habitat. It was important to her to build conscientiously. “We need to be responsive to the place we live in and the people, animals and plants who share these places with us,” she says.

An Aspen homeowner purchased a property with a challenged landscape—the existing trees struggling, and the pond choked with algae. A team of landscape architects set to work focusing on reforestation and returning the pond to a healthy aquatic system. The result, on page 113, offers a beautiful expansiveness. “We wanted to integrate the property back to the time when grasses, trees and wildlife flourished,” says landscape architect Mike Albert of Design Workshop.

A couple in Montana played a game when they walked the property that has been in the husband’s family for 62 years. If we ever built a home, where would it be? They chose a knoll that was the site of an old salt box where the cows used to graze. The architecture and building team lowered the knoll a few feet, designing the home with a flat roof—as if it sprang from the surrounding sagebrush, page 174. “The homeowners have a deep respect for this family land, so we blended the material and forms to feel organic and native to the property,” says Jeff Lusin of 45 Architecture & Interiors.

As we await the arrival of summer in the Mountain West, I encourage you to get out on the land wherever you are. And if you can’t—you can experience it in Taylor Sheridan’s recent TV endeavor, The Madison, where the land has a starring role. Makes you feel like you’re wading in the water, casting a line.