By Camille Lefevre

	Click for more images Architect: Storey Architects Builder: Blue Ribbon Builders Landscape designer: Dale Dombrowski Interior design: Lynne Catron, Virginia Rippee and Associates

As a child, she attended summer camp in rustic log and stone buildings constructed during the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. As a young wife, she and her husband backpacked through wilderness areas. In 1984, she accompanied her husband on a business trip to Big Sky, Montana, where the Tennessee-based couple discovered cross-county skiing and subsequently began annual winter trips to Montana, residing at a guest ranch with great ski trails.

When a portion of the ranch was subdivided into lots, they selected a 20-acre site just 75 feet from the trail and started planning a second home, from which they could indulge their passions for fly fishing and backpacking, as well as skiing. A log home was a given. The development’s covenants specified as much, and the couple had always wanted “a cabin in the woods,” she says.

Their design process began when they discovered the book Cowboy High Style: Thomas Molesworth to the New West, by Elizabeth Clair Flood. They were captivated by the furnishings crafted from leather, gnarled wood, swollen burls, and peeled poles that Molesworth had created and sold from his shop in Cody, Wyoming, from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Research indicated that a number of heirs to the Molesworth tradition were making fine western-style furniture in Cody. The couple couldn’t resist ordering and purchasing furnishings for their future home, including doors, cabinetry, and light fixtures. Then they asked their architect, Janet Storey, of Storey Architects in Big Sky, to design an authentic log home around their furnishings and artwork. “It was an unusual project in that aspect,” the architect confirms.

To house their collections, Storey continues, the couple “wanted a very rustic home that incorporated stone and logs and that looked as if it had been there for a while.” The historic Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone Park with its massive stonework and logs of contorted lodge pole was their template. For the 4,049-square-foot, four-bedroom house, “we used appropriate-size wall logs in terms of diameter, and then we upsized vertical posts and roof members to carry the theme of a lodge built with larger logs, like the Old Faithful Inn,” explains Chris Bishop of Alpine Log Homes, the company that handcrafted the log work.

The logs are standing dead lodge pole pine; the custom-crafted cabinets and doors are of recycled wood; and the floor is reclaimed American chestnut. Unlike the mud and horsehair originally used to mortar logs, the gray chinking is a synthetic that expands and contracts with the climate. But the light color reflects the authenticity of the original materials.

“When the house is lit up at night, it does convey that feeling of permanence the clients were after,” adds Storey. The siting contributes to this feeling. The house spreads across a meadow; behind and five feet below the house, and connected via a breezeway, is a garage.

The couple rallied area craftspeople to infuse the rustic home with the individuality of the western spirit. “When you’re working with really creative people, ideas just explode,” the homeowner says. Yellowstone Traditions in Bozeman handcrafted each door, some with etched-glass scenes of local natural landmarks. The company also designed and crafted the inlaid-wood bar cabinetry, vanity tables in the powder room and upstairs guest room, the cabinet housing the television and stereo, and the peeled-wood trim along the loft and beneath the bar.

Instead of a study, the clients asked for a library hall to house a collection of Yellowstone publications and first-edition books by western authors. The fireplace was hand-constructed piece by piece. “When the stone mason got done, he said, ‘It’s the last one I’m ever going to do. It’s my masterpiece,’” Storey recalls. Even modern kitchen conveniences carry a patina of the old West: aged copper panels front the refrigerator, and the range has a handmade, weathered copper hood.

Such exquisite attention to construction and detail resulted in a unique display space for the couple’s collection of western furniture and art. All of the furniture, except for a sofa bed, was handcrafted, as were light fixtures and sconces. Western art and sculpture, Navajo weavings and pottery (antiques and reproductions), and memorabilia of Yellowstone National Park were methodically placed in their proper positions throughout the house. The homeowner designed and sewed the home’s leather, ultrasuede, and linen drapes and cowboy quilts.

“In terms of being organized and thinking through what they wanted, these clients were extraordinary. Everyone who worked on the project realized how special they are,” Storey says. Bishop adds that Alpine Log Homes found it “refreshing to build something this authentic. We were fortunate to work with someone who had such vision.”