To wander the land around High Meadow Residence in winter is to be immersed in the vastness of mountains draped in snow and scrabbled with pine, spruce, and fir trees. In the foothills of this dramatic landscape are clumps of quaking aspen, their creamy trunks rising like sculptures in the bright alpine light. Naturally, this special place played a huge role in the design of a getaway for a couple with young children. Situated on the edge of Aspen, in the Roaring Fork Valley, this pastoral area still feels like the ranchland it once was. In winter it’s all snow, but in summer the house has a long view across a meadow of high grasses, a foreground to the mountains.
Lake Flato are experts in designing on rugged landscapes, having built a portfolio of structurally expressive buildings set on working Texas ranches. “Our philosophy with houses, or anything, is about leveraging the connection with the outdoors,” says Ted Flato, FAIA. “We think of buildings as portals to the environment. Living spaces immediately invite your eye to go out to the wonderful, broad landscape. If you can leverage the landscape, you can build a lot less.”
There are neighbors, of course, and to create the illusion that the house is alone in the big outdoors, the architects devised a three-part scheme. A large timber living pavilion acts like a big breezeway that connects two gabled volumes, reminiscent of western homesteads. Deep overhangs create porches on both sides of the building—one side facing east toward the infinite borrowed meadow, the other looking into a courtyard along the front of the house. This public zone is bracketed by a fieldstone-clad primary bedroom volume where the land rises on the right, and a two-story, charred-wood kids’ barn built on the downslope on the left—a logical move that puts some space between the adults’ and kids’ bedrooms, while creating a comfortable place to come together in the middle.
The new dwelling is the opposite of a house previously on the site—a relic of a time when Aspen was primarily a winter playground. “The inclination in cold climates was not to spread things out but to put it into a box,” says Ted. “The big difference is that summer has become a bigger deal in Aspen than it used to be, so you want something that engages the landscape and you’re not just worried about keeping the heat in.” The decision to build new led to another opportunity: to frame close-up views of trees. “One of the best challenges of laying out the site was how to preserve and celebrate these gorgeous aspens that had grown up around the existing house,” says Dan Carter, AIA. “It was a lot of fun to get everything to work around them. The house feels like it’s been around much longer than it has because of that, and the light through the trees is really spectacular.”
The site’s natural features drove the program locations. The primary suite sits close to the property line because that edge could be solid, whereas the kids’ barn on the north needed space to spill out. “There was a natural hedgerow of trees on the north side that we could leverage and have our own meadow between it and the house,” Ted says. On the street side, the barn and stone-clad garage slide past each other, creating the threshold for an inviting entry sequence. “You come in between a series of walls, and you’re in what we consider the entry hall, but it’s an exterior space,” Ted says. “You don’t have to build a giant hall; you have an alley between two spaces—the garage and barn, with some landscaping. Then you come to the front door. It’s a space that allows you to breathe before you come into the house.”
Skin and Skeleton
The composition embodies Lake Flato’s approach to buildings, in which the design is inseparable from the way it’s made. “The ornament of a building is how it’s made, usually,” Ted says. “The textures come from how you’re going to make it. We love talking about: what is it going to be like when you walk onto the site and people are building it? Will they ask, ‘Why did you do this?’ We don’t want the why, and we want to celebrate their work.”
Because Aspen is an expensive place to build, post and beam construction was a logical choice for the open main living volume, using prefabricated Douglas fir beams. This method also prioritized the view. The wood-framed structure sits outside the thermal envelope of windows, which disappear into the floor. “It allowed us to have doors that were independent of the columns and we could roll the whole room out, so it can be a complete pavilion,” Ted says. “To the right is the grounded courtyard, to the left is the meadow with nice, low-angle light across the big open field.”
For builder Keith Teahen, one of the more challenging aspects of this pavilion was to perfectly line up the window framing with the mortise-and-tendon structural posts that stand outside them. “You had to work backward to execute that correctly,” he says. Dark-stained walnut cabinets and a blackened steel storage wall and fireplace wall create a clean, simple look. Within that room, a breakfast bay pokes out under the broad roof. And a mudroom and media room connect the pavilion to the garage, defining one edge of the entry walk and offering a place to cocoon. Their outer wall is a continuation of the stone façade that “hides” the side-entry garage volume. A linear, floor-level window brings light into the media room without interrupting the massing or creating an unwanted view in from the front walkway.
While the main living space is the most open, with its series of columns, beams, glass, and sliding walls that open to the outside, “the other wood-frame buildings are more skin buildings with wood on the inside,” Ted says. “The notion of skin also informs how we make the building.”
Entered to the left off the main entry, the kids’ barn feels like a single story because you enter at midlevel. That move allowed for a playful stair to a catwalk above the common area that connects two bedrooms under the roofline. A few steps down from the midlevel is a game lounge bracketed by three more bedrooms. This volume has charred wood on the outside and Douglas fir inside. The architects ran the charred wood wall inside along the foyer that links the two volumes.
While the burnt wood cladding was an aesthetic choice, it was above all a practical one, Ted notes. “We were lucky enough early in our career to get to go to Japan. That trip was very influential, both for the idea of borrowed landscape and courtyards, and also the timeless buildings in Kyoto built in the 1600s, which are so honest, with columns and beams and rolling walls. But we were also impressed with the practical nature of those buildings, like burning the wood to be durable in a place that had a lot of rain. In this case, we wanted black wood not because it’s black, but because it’s durable. It doesn’t require any stains and handles the moisture you can get in Aspen.”
The barn is the one place where a single piece of steel was used to create the long span. This beam supports not just the bridge above it, but joists that cantilever to become a porch roof on the north side. Finishes are precise and seamless, such as the shadow gap between the polished concrete floors and wood walls. “Anything that looks so clean is the most difficult to produce,” Keith says. “To keep the edges perfect, we had to finish the concrete floors before building on top of them and keep them protected throughout the job. But the architects did an amazing job of integrating it into the setting. It photographs so well because it’s one with the environment—it’s so warm, even with the contemporary finishes of concrete and metal.”
Time Out
All those building surfaces support the design’s sense of comfort and delight. The barn is a dynamic space that feels attached but separate—a realm unto itself. When they aren’t playing games or curled up on couches, the youngsters can sit on the stairs or retreat to kid-sized eddies built into the catwalk, including a daybed and desk. In the childish imagination, it comes close to being a real barn. “You’re viewing down over furniture and out to the meadow. It’s a type of barn experience, with rooms below and above, and a bigger volume for hay. People make houses to look like barns; this space can be a barn when Aspen becomes more rural someday,” Ted jokes.
Indeed, a big part of this home’s appeal is the range of experiences it offers in close proximity to each other. While the barn flows out to a side field for throwing football, the main pavilion centers on the view of the big public meadow and mountains. Clad in fieldstone, the primary suite reads as a monolithic, gabled structure with a private porch. Entered through a small office connector, it is a place to decompress while enjoying the view through a big window. Closets float between the bedroom and a bath, whose swirling marble surfaces come alive in the winter-white landscape.
Designed outdoor spaces might seem gratuitous in an already stunning landscape, but the courtyards make the opposite case. Once the architects know where a project is headed, they often bring in the area’s top landscape architects to fit the house to the land. Aspen-based Bluegreen helped finesse paths, plantings, and details in the entry courtyard and the board-formed-concrete walled courtyard off the living pavilion, which offers outdoor dining and seating around a fireplace. “We don’t ever draw a line between landscape and house—or between architecture and interior design,” Ted says.
In fact, this project triggered the firm’s decision to bring interior design into its practice, led by an architect. It’s something they’d been considering for a while, since their San Antonio office is surrounded by makers of furniture, upholstery, and metalwork. In this project in particular, “the interiors are truly informative to the experience of the house,” says Dan, who worked with Constanza Collarte, a Miami-based interior designer whom the client brought in. For Ted, it’s an opportunity to be more thoughtful early on about how people live in the house. “As you get into a more in-depth approach, you start thinking about, maybe we should tweak this,” he says. “It’s one more opportunity to refine something you’ve already spent time on.”
Embracing that idea, all these ambience-giving gestures were aimed at enhancing the sense of living in this majestic landscape, if that were possible. As it turns out, it is.
High Meadow Residence
Aspen, Colorado
Architect: Ted Flato, FAIA, principal in charge; project team: Steve Raike, FAIA; Dan Carter, AIA; Colin Gorsuch, AIA, Lake Flato Architects, San Antonio, Texas
Builder: Keith Teahen, Kaegebein Fine Homebuilding, Carbondale, Colorado
Interior designer: Constanza Collarte, Collarte Interiors, Miami
Landscape architect: Bluegreen, Aspen, Colorado
Structural Engineer: KL&A, Carbondale, Colorado
Stylist: Lisa Rowe, Los Angeles
Project size: 7,600 square feet
Site size: 1.5 acres
Construction cost: Withheld
Photography: Joe Fletcher Photography; Shade Degges
Key Products
Cabinetry: Boffi, custom blackened steel, custom white oak
Cladding: Delta Millworks (barn), Silver Heritage Quartzite (garage, primary suite)
Cooktop/range: Boffi
Countertops: Boffi stainless steel
Engineered lumber: Frasierwood (living pavilion)
Finish materials: Douglas fir, plaster
Flooring: Concrete, white oak
HVAC: Radiant, forced air
Insulation: ZIP System
Lighting control systems: Lutron
Passage doors and hardware: Douglas fir, Sun Valley Bronze
Refrigerator: Sub-Zero
Roofing: Zinc standing-seam metal roof
Vanities and pedestal lavs: Boffi
Windows/Window wall systems: Panoramah!
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