10 Apr From The Editor: From House to Home

Building a home is immensely complex. In addition to melding a design-build team, integrating the interests and desires of individual family members, meeting the needs and requirements of the site, and flexibly appealing to a required timeframe, every element of the structure must perform its function. The purpose of the house is to become a home. And yet, despite these intricacies, homes are made every single day.

Looking at some of the region’s most distinguished architecture, it’s clear that the most successful professionals work diligently to balance the varied requirements of each project to fulfill the homeowners’ visions. In many cases, they must find the exact sweet spot, the Goldilocks zone between modern and rustic, expansive and manageable, cozy and distinctive. The resulting features allude to the story of the home, repeating across dimensions, between rooms, and through materials to elevate the whole.

In the Northern Rockies, today’s mountain living is defined by this successful merger of seemingly disparate traits. As an artist applies strokes of dark and light paint to create a composition, so, too, do architects, contractors, and interior designers utilize contrasting forms and materials to establish the right balance in a home. Whether it’s glazing and transparency throughout a room that precisely overlooks exterior water features and towering mountain peaks (page 148), carefully stacked articulated crib wall siding appearing adjacent to concrete and steel (page 220), a sod roof capping an interior furnished with artful angles and elegance (page 230), or a multi-generational layout that mingles a front-and-center rec room with four intimate bedroom suites (page 264), this annual HOME edition showcases some of the ways design-build teams triumphantly achieve homeowners’ goals.

By harmoniously blending function and design, home professionals create spaces that will literally hold people. When that space uniquely appeals to the owner — and integrates all their varied desires, goals, and interests — the structure is called home.