My home opens broadly to the south with an oversized glass door leading to a covered patio from which a panorama unfolds. Beginning in the east, a distant ridgeline traces the division of our valley from a nearby chain of lakes while foreground hills sprawl...
Intended or not, it’s often the simple moments that paint pictures on our hearts: a casual exchange between friends, the striking call of a loon across a lake, an old barn at dusk, flowers in a pot by the front door, swelling clouds before a...
For a few fleeting months, the Northern Rockies are graced with brilliant summer sunshine. Clouds billow and sweep across an endless blue horizon that is, in many places, striated with the purples, blues, and greens of the mountains. It is during this season that many people...
Designing and building a home, on its surface, is a fundamental procedure. One must compose a structure that provides for primary needs — shelter and warmth — while offering spaces to store necessities, prepare food, and sleep. Yet, in meeting these universal needs, homeowners, designers,...
For a boy who only knew red dirt, heavy air, and the threat of twisters, visiting the Northern Rocky Mountains must have been magnificent. He traveled by train from the southern Great Plains to work on a U.S. Forest Service crew in northwest Montana, where...
The winter day is often at its coldest as dawn breaks. With crystalline snowflakes gathered on the ground, shrouding the landscape in a soft layer of white, the air is a thin, heady brilliance as it fills the lungs. The cold surrounds, stings, seeps into...
Art is ubiquitous. Or more to the point, beautiful scenes, precious moments, wondrous animals, stirring events — they are all around us, and the works inspired by these elements abound. As Whitefish, Montana artist Nate Closson (page 146) says, “This whole world is beautiful. …...
During summer afternoons in the Northern Rockies, it’s nearly impossible not to ponder what writer Rick Bass calls “the power of spaciousness.” Cumulus clouds shift within a cerulean sky, their shapes illuminated by gentle rays of sunshine, casting darkened shadows on the ground. Somewhere, a...
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...
The allure of the river captured me at a young age. Fortunate to have grown up near the banks of a year-round stream, I keenly explored its wonders and secrets, seldom, if ever, disappointed. In middle and high school, in a complete embrace of the...