built of the really beautiful local limestone, this house is small but quite grand

the house and the tree hold steadfastly to each other on the wind-whipped landscape

the worn softness of the stone is a strange contrast to the brittle sharpness and geometry of the metal roof.

the southwest corner is failing as the mortar wets and dries, cracking out under the stones

A stalwart little house

photos by Mark Gerwing

Yet another post on the progress of the house up on Sunshine Canyon.  Designed by Mark Gerwing, with David Biek, Stacey Root and Brian Nelson at Arcadea, the house is being built by Cottonwood Custom Builders.

We are well past the half-way mark and the pace of finishes is picking up with most of the exterior stone already installed.  This is a photo from down the steeply sloping site looking back up at the east face of the building.

These are photos of a house just finishing construction up on Sunshine Canyon, a companion to the large stone house that I have posted previously.  Designed by Stacey Root and David Biek at my former office, Arcadea, it was built by Cottonwood Custom Builders.  I have been helping with construction oversight including choosing finishes, colors, etc.  Congratulations to Cottonwood for a nicely executed project – Scott Reardon, Matt Fitzrandolph, Jeff Hindman, Tom Roberts, Kim Neil, and all the others.

This is an image of on-going process on a really interesting project, a departure from large, mountain houses.  This is a small, simple house centered around a beautiful existing ash tree on a property south of Loveland, Colorado.  Using the tree as the organizing center, the house arrays itself around a courtyard, using the tree as the barometer of the seasons, providing shade in the summer, revealing mountain views in the winter.

The house up Sunshine Canyon is proceeding along.  This is yet another construction photo of the progress.  The wood panels below the windows have yet to be stained and the final roofing material, corrugated weathering steel, has yet to be installed.  More in a couple of weeks.

This is a project currently under construction up Sunshine Canyon, just west of Boulder, Colorado. It is part of an ongoing interest of mine in time and building, a kind of phenomenal temporality. By that I mean that the rather than trying to design a project that is “timeless” or certainly that has faux finishes and materials to make it artificially aged, I designed the house to be a series of linked buildings that are individually simple, vernacular forms but in combination raise questions of their making. Each building’s details and forms are not strictly consistent but rather make a theme-and-variation syncopation. Making a building with the capacity, maybe the insistence, for multiple readings and interpretations lends a layered identity to the project. Taking cues from the owners and the basic phenomena of the site, the project steps down a steep, rocky hillside, part village, part house. The courtyard creates a internalized, domestic landscape that then extends and projects itself out to the site and the world beyond.

Computer model by Mark Gerwing, 2006.