Case Study: House of Fir
TREADING LIGHTLY
After years of RV life, retirees build a house they and the landscape can live with.
RANGE MAGAZINE – AUGUST 2018 By Dina Mishev | Photography by David Angello
“Of course we had a groundbreaking celebration,” Carol Schoner says as if it were as usual as filing for a building permit. Sitting at the dining table of the home she and husband Phil moved into in December 2016, she pushes a paper titled “Groundbreaking Words” toward me. “These are the promises we made then,” she says.
“To these majestic mountains: You are why we selected this spot to build our home. We promise every morning we will look to the west in appreciation.
“To the wildlife: This was your home before it was ours. We will respect your space and minimize our intrusion into it.
“To the great sea of sagebrush: Please be patient. We will disturb the terrain as little as possible. We will do all we can to repair and restore this space.
“Our goal is for our house to sit lightly on the land.”
Before the Schoners built on a two-and-a-half acre site the sagebrush flats behind the Jackson Hole Airport, they looked everywhere in the valley, from condos at the Four Seasons to a Jackson Hole Golf & Tennis cottage to scrappers to other lots. But then they decided views were their primary consideration. This lot was the clear winner, Carol says, adding, “I thought, if nothing else, whatever happens to us with our health, if I can wake up and see these mountains, everything would be all right.” The goals of architectural firm kt814, founded by Rich Assenberg and Nathan Gray, and owners Carol and Phil Schoner aligned in this project: “We wanted to respect the nature of the site,” the architects say. “We wanted the planar landscape to feel like it was traveling through the home—letting the outside in, and back out again.”
The architects advised the Schoners to invest in the home’s windows and cabinetry. “They were right,” Carol says. In the combined kitchen/dining/living space, a 10-foot tall, 24-foot-wide lift-slide window/ sliding door (FSC-certified Thermo Clad Pine) by Zola Windows opens to bring the outside in.
Now 67 (Carol) and 75 (Phil), the Schoners plan to live in this house until “we go to the old cowboys’ home,” Carol says. “It’s a very elder-friendly home. There is not a step anywhere. And that was the whole idea.” When the couple hired architectural firm kt814 to design the house, they asked for an age-in-place, open-space design that was clean and contemporary and that, of course, made the most of the property’s views, which are unobstructed and of the entire Teton Range. The area is also rich in wildlife; it’s in a migration corridor. “When we were inside, I wanted to feel that the outside came in to us,” Carol says. “I wanted to lie in bed and watch moose wander by between my feet.”
But now that they’ve been in the house for almost two years, Carol says she’s not sure she is living up to the promises made at the groundbreaking ceremony. “It’s hard to maintain that sense of wonder,” she says. Her excitement as she talks about watching a bison wallow in a patch of dirt twenty feet from the dining table just the day before suggests otherwise, though.
Phil talks about one night when he woke up around 2 a.m.: “I just happened to look out the windows from the bed and the Big Dipper was perfectly framed,” he says. He woke up Carol and the two sat together on the outside patio and wondered at the stars and Milky Way for about an hour. “The stars were actually shimmering,” Carol says. “It was amazing.”
The day after I visited with them, vegetation restoration consultants were coming to replant sagebrush in the area nearest the home, the only part of the lot, other than the house site itself, that was disturbed during construction.
Click on the cover below to read the entire article, and view the Zola Windows’ installed throughout the home.
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