Kirsten Molz all the time considered herself as a seashore individual greater than a mountain individual. However when her household rented a home in Park Metropolis, Utah, in the beginning of the pandemic, she reconsidered.
“I all the time wished an ocean home,” mentioned Ms. Molz, 51, an inside designer who calls Pasadena, Calif., dwelling. That want modified when she and her husband escaped to Park Metropolis in June 2020 with two of their kids, three household pals and three canine.
“It was so stunning right here,” Ms. Molz mentioned. “I sat outdoors, proper over the mid-mountain path, watching hikers go by, and I simply had this sense in my coronary heart that I may reside right here.”
When she informed her husband, “he referred to as an agent inside 5 minutes,” Ms. Molz mentioned.They dreamed of constructing a home that would function a trip dwelling for now and maybe a retirement dwelling sooner or later, in addition to a spot that their grown kids — Emma, 28, Charlie, 26 and Ollie, 20 — would wish to go to usually.
After seeing a number of improvement tons, the couple settled on an eight-acre mountainside property with a meadow surrounded by aspen timber, which they purchased for $2.5 million that September.
Envisioning a glossy, modernist home quite than a country lodge-style dwelling, Ms. Molz mentioned she wished a residence that felt slightly just like the nature-embracing construction depicted within the 2014 film “Ex Machina.”
Looking for architects on-line, she found Sparano & Mooney Structure. “After I noticed their web site, I believed, ‘These guys may actually do this,’” Ms. Molz mentioned.
She discovered a keen associate in Anne Mooney, a principal on the agency. “We had been actually excited as a result of it was a good looking web site and it was going to be a ceaselessly dwelling,” Ms. Mooney mentioned.
Over the next months, Ms. Mooney and her group visited the lot a number of occasions, considering the place to position the home within the panorama to take most benefit of its pure magnificence. “We had been eager about the expertise of the positioning and this concept of forest bathing,” she mentioned, describing the observe of slowing down and experiencing nature with all of the senses.
In consequence, the agency embedded the bottom flooring of the 8,200-square-foot home within the hillside and pulled aside the rooms of the highest flooring to open them as much as the panorama.
“The home steps up with the positioning and a number of the key areas are linked by bridges,” which operate as sunny hallways, Ms. Mooney mentioned. “The bridges are glass and you’ve got the aspen timber on either side of you as you’re strolling via them, so you are feeling such as you’re a part of that forest expertise.”
Particularly, one glass bridge hyperlinks the primary dwelling area to the first suite; one other connects the doorway corridor to the mudroom and storage. The architects clad the remainder of the outside in pine siding, which was thermally modified to extend its sturdiness.
Inside, Ms. Molz selected white oak flooring and cabinetry, and gauzy plaster in a creamy off-white coloration for lots of the partitions and ceilings. “I wished it to really feel heat in order that after I’m right here within the winter and it’s chilly outdoors, I received’t be lacking California,” she mentioned.
She additionally used the chance of constructing a customized home to amass particular items she had lengthy admired, together with a matte black Lacanche vary for the kitchen and painted by hand silk wallpaper from Griffin & Wong depicting birds and flowering timber for the library. She additionally put in a customized pool desk from the Los Angeles-based furnishings maker Cooper Reynolds Gross within the library, which comes with a white-oak prime that enables it to double as a large-scale eating desk for entertaining.
“We don’t have a devoted eating room,” Ms. Molz mentioned, “however we will have Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner in there.”
For furnishings, she blended classic midcentury trendy items with up to date upholstered objects for sink-in lounging, together with an outsized sectional couch from Restoration {Hardware} and swivel chairs upholstered in nubby cloth from Lawson-Fenning for the lounge. She labored with the Pasadena-based panorama structure agency EPT Design to design the hillside round the home, together with stone steps from the first bed room to the sauna.
After breaking floor in June 2021, Upland Growth accomplished development in August 2023 at a price of about $600 per sq. foot.
Now having fun with the completed challenge, Ms. Molz mentioned she wouldn’t change a factor if she needed to do it over again. “I can truthfully say that it has outstripped our expectations, just about in each manner,” she mentioned, including that it’s a house her kids additionally love coming again to. “It’s only a excellent place for us all to congregate and spend time collectively.”
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