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and also at the Custom Home Design Awards and Residential Architect Design Awards, is a site-responsive, low-slung, shed-roofed, 3,700-square-foot home using steel panels, local stone, brushed cedar, and square-cut logs. “It didn’t feel right to put a heavy house on this land because we’re not in the middle of the woods,” Washburn says. “It looks like the house is growing right out of the land.” Not everyone was as taken with the Washburns’ new digs. Washburn laughs, recalling when they
This guest house in Pinedale designed by Meghan Hanson of Natural Dwellings blends cedar and oxidized metal siding.
invited over a neighbor—a longtime, Henry Fonda-type rancher. “He said, ‘Well, this sure is a strange house. But hell, it’s your money.’ ” THIS “STRANGE” STYLE—a blending of modern elements like oxidized steel and concrete with more traditional western components like log timbers, tin shed roofs, and barnwood—is gaining a
foothold in the area. While not everyone is a fan of a mountain modern/western contemporary aesthetic, it shows the Tetons aren’t just a place for pushing the extreme-sport envelope—valley architects are blazing their own trails. John Carney, who founded Carney Logan Burke in 1992 and, in 2008, was named an AIA Fellow, credits Arizonabased architect Will Bruder with helping inspire both local architects and clients to push boundaries. In the 1990s, Bruder, who is known for his creative use of materials and light, was hired to do two high-profile projects in the valley: a new headquarters for Mad River Boat Trips and a new library for the county. Carney recalls all sorts of controversy around the finished buildings. “Some locals dismissed [Mad River] as a ‘corrugated rusty-metal squashed shoebox,’ ” says Carney, whose firm has recently designed a slew of public buildings that don’t include traditional stacked logs—the Home Ranch Welcome Center on Cache St., Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s Lower Tram Terminal, the Jackson Hole Airport expansion, and the interpretative center at the Laurance S. Rockefeller
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JACKSON HOLE MAGAZINE WINTER 2014