Good news if you are looking to fix up your house.
A firm from London recently constructed a home in Teton County for a young out-of-state couple and perhaps now that they’re done with this project, they’ve got extra time on their hands.
The McLean Quinlan firm is responsible for Joanne and Rico Zorkendorfer’s new house which was recently promoted by Architectural Digest’s Twitter account.
Like many of us in Wyoming, when we go home we want to escape the real world.
So the house, according to the magazine, “perfectly answered the Zorkendorfers’ request for a true refuge.”
Luckily for the Zorkendorfers, they found a house that “occupied an extraordinary position on four elevated acres” over looking the Jackson Hole valley.
So they did what we would all do: bulldoze it. After all, it was old.
Like so many of us, the Zorkendorfers wanted a house that felt “restorative, serene, and elemental”.
To achieve that, they brought in home furnishings using “robes de llengües textiles from Mallorca and Otomi embroidered fabrics from Mexico.”
That’s a great idea. Sadly, when we checked the Home Depot website, they didn’t seem to have any “robes de llengües” textiles but maybe that’s because we weren’t able to type-in an umlaut on their page.
Regardless, the Zorkendorfers had the same issue we all have whether you are building in Wamsutter, Lusk, Shoshoni, or Jackson: how to design a home based on your “cultural roots”?
The Zorkendorfers had a real dilemma.
“I have a love affair with New Zealand’s wide-open beach houses, and Rico has an affinity for chalets, so we wanted to create something that was a marriage of those two things,” Joanne explained.
Oddly, we had that same conversation when we were at the Deerehaven Liquor and Lounge in Moorcroft last summer.
Our solution was to build a shed in the backyard by the outhouse.
The Zorkendorfers took another approach: “[Build] a central living space bordered by expanses of glass and accessing intimate zones for dining, napping, and the like.”
And then there’s the age-old question of what to do with the inside of the house. Thankfully the McLean Quinlan firm figured that out as well.
“Fir and hemlock predominate, their golden tones complemented by more stone and pebbles sourced from the Snake River, a waterway that whiplashes across the valley below,” the author explains.
That’s actually helpful because we were wondering what to do with our neon Blatz beer sign we won at a carnival back in ’97.
“It’s a privilege to live in Jackson Hole,” Joanne told the magazine. “We are surrounded by national parks, and there is an incredible Native American history here too. Building a house in an area like this demands that you create something really special.”
That’s good to hear. We feel the same way. That’s why we purchased six tires instead of four. It gets really windy and the extra weight should help to keep the roof attached to the house in January.
