By Camille LeFevre

	Click for more images Architect: Harry Teague Architects Interior designer: Hope Conners Builder: Conners Construction Landscape designer: Mt Daly Enterprises

By definition, guesthouses are small, detached buildings that allow harried homeowners to retreat unencumbered into their homes for the night, while nearby guests are afforded privacy.

So what happens when two couples decide to subvert that classic definition, and build guesthouses as their own living quarters? Architectural alchemy. Near aspen, colorado, Harry Teague Architects designed a modernist gem, a simple box within a box—to combine an art gallery, living room, sleeping quarters, kitchen, and dining area into one seamless expression of creative living.

Meanwhile, outside of bozeman, montana, a professional couple opted to build and live in their guesthouse first, before designing their main house. Drawing from an agricultural vernacular, BT Timberworks designed a fully equipped structure brimming with whimsy, woodsy charm, and spiritual uplift. The house is sited conscientiously in the landscape and with regard to nearby buildings.

Years ago, harry teague Architects designed a 4,000-square-foot modern home clad in galvanized metal and purple stucco for two artists who lived near Aspen, Colorado. When new owners bought the house as a second home, they converted the art studios into bedrooms. The remodel was so successful, says Harry Teague, that the owners said their family kept showing up and the house became way too busy all the time. So the couple approached Teague about designing another guesthouse for them, rather than for their guests.

The wife, who grew up in the Northwest backpacking the Cascade Mountains, asked for a place as simple as a “tent platform with a Murphy bed, so we could get away and have our peace and quiet,” she recalls. While she wanted “the feeling of being outside,” she also requested “space, like a little art gallery and living room, in which to read when the Murphy bed was up.”

Teague’s solution was simple and clever. Inside the 800-square-foot guesthouse—a purple stucco and glass box—is a smaller stand-alone box that compactly houses, and easily converts to accommodate all of the couple’s amenities. “They didn’t want this house to get all cluttered up with stuff,” Teague says. “So the simplest thing was to put everything they needed in a box inside that box.”

On the northeast side of the interior box, which is constructed of wood and oriented strand board, is the kitchen. A Murphy bed opens out of the southwest wall and night tables slide out on either side of the bed. Tucked into the other sides of the box are a closet and the bathroom; the walls along these “hallways” function as gallery space.

A metal truss that runs the length of the guesthouse’s 12-foot-high ceiling and the concrete floor add to the interior’s urban art-gallery feel. Floor-to-ceiling windows allow the couple to experience the outdoors from the inside, while an extensive deck creates three outdoor rooms amid the fragrant sagebrush and juniper trees.

“I hate to say it, but the guesthouse is too sophisticated for grandkids,” says the homeowner, who lives with her husband in a Denver high-rise during the week. “We’re weekenders. So when we’re here for just three nights and two days, I don’t want to get too involved in the mechanics of living. This little house works wonderfully.”