Two Architects Build a Chalet-Style Getaway

hi i'm sheri and i'm john uh welcome to our house uh come on in and we'll give you a tour [Music] we're both architects living and working in the bay area and now up here in truckee i've been coming up to donner summit for 30 plus years it started as you know weekend ski trips and then it progressed into buying a cabin up at donner summit which is about six miles from here we had a very rustic place that we had to snowshoe into in the winter yeah and when so when i first met you you had that place and so my first experience coming up to donner summit was that cabin and i think spending time up there it was it's not it's not hard to love this place for sure and so i think that first cabin really influenced some of our design decisions in this house so now instead of sitting on a rock eating clif bars we're sitting on our sofa inside looking at the same view which is what really kind of brought us to this place we spend most of our time in this room this is the social space we really wanted to light the ceiling plane and so there are led strips on all of the beams so at night the whole ceiling glows but the focal point is this pulsing fixture that um you know it was certainly not something that was in our budget like you can go all around this and we knew that we'd be seeing this from all angles especially with the lofts because you see it from all different heights and all different angles so the fact that they designed their fixtures so that you never actually see the light source was was also nice i mean and it's just a beautiful fixture so with this house as we come up the hill it was also important for us to relate to the indoor outdoor as much as possible this sliding door is one of one of my favorite features of the house because it really literally brings the outdoor in we come hiking down the trail with a big group of people right into the house it just really opens up the space so the kitchen this is this is a john's realm mostly i i take i take orders very well but it was fun i think to be able to design a kitchen for you that has like we know obviously where every little thing goes in the kitchen like the spice rack drawers is a fun one this is this is a detail that we designed in so we've got you know we got spices we got oils we got vinegar and it's all out of the way but it's all right where you need it so that's that's a fun detail in plan the concept of the house was that the entertaining space and the guests get to stay up here and we have a more private area downstairs we have the guest room and the guest bath and the guest bath is the only interior space in the house so it didn't have natural light so we put a skylight in here and it we wanted it to feel cave-like because it was the interior of the house yeah so this is our library space on the way to the master bedroom suite so it creates a little bit of privacy for the master bedroom suite but instead of just leaving it as a circulation space we allow the hallway to be a little bit wider and become a library space that we could actually inhabit and sit down and and read a book and i don't know it's cozy i like spending time here oh yeah i love the low wood scene yeah it has a bit of more intimate scale than the great room so it is a nice cozy quiet place to sit and read a book yeah so the master bedroom is one of the two spots where you can get a sense of the entire space of the house from one place so you get a really sense of all three levels you can see who's coming in the front door and get a sense of the entire structure from one vantage point [Music] yeah so this is our study slash extra guest space when we have to work this is this is where we work but because we wanted the space to function as a guest room too we designed this desk to fold down against the wall to save space and then the sofa folds out to be a guest bed so this is the the entry of the house from the moment you first come into the space this is where you can really get an understanding of the entire timber frame structure and how the house is put together and when you look up you see the roof structure continuing all the way through the great room so from this entry point from when you first walk in the front door you have a sense of the whole volume and how the house was put together we as the owners get to enjoy this same experience every time we walk in the door because the garage happens to be right here at the same foyer and it's not a plan where the owner always comes into the garage at the back with you know at the kitchen back door we also get to experience this [Music]

Channel: Dwell

Views: 155,823

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Id: MU0CVQW5jLc

Length: 5min 9sec (309 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021