Mason's lodge: with their beautiful site and freewheeling programs, is it any wonder great getaways so often make great houses? four vacation homes with very long guest lists

Residential Architect, July, 2003 by Shelley D. Hutchins

Thirty years ago, Ron Mason, FALA, avid kayaker and president of Denver-based Anderson Mason Dale Architects, bought 17 acres of remote, mountainous forest land along the upper Arkansas River in Colorado. "I have a love affair with rivers--especially the Arkansas," he says. For a decade, the only structure on the site was a Sioux-style tipi with a firebox and a dirt floor, where Mason stayed during the summer while teaching white-water rafting and preparing for races. Over time, two log cabins, a 50-foot tower, a workshop, and a studio have sprung up beside the tipi. Coming soon is the "River Room," a detached dining room with unobstructed waterfront views.

Mason, whose 45-member firm focuses primarily on large-scale public projects, refers to the design and construction of his river-valley archipelago as a therapeutic architectural luxury. "There's never really been a master plan," he says, "but the buildings have been added in a way that allows me to think at length about their location and position so they complement the land in the best possible way."

First to be built were the airy main living cabin and a small guest cabin that harbors a Finnish sauna. Both were constructed from 10-inch lodge-pole pine logs cut from standing dead timber and assembled via the Swedish cope system, in which grooves scooped out of one side of the logs allow them to fit together tightly. Mason opted for log construction because the process intrigued him and the raw material fit his vision of a riverside retreat. "Once I got the idea of building with logs out of my system, though, I took a fairly significant departure with the tower," he says.

Indeed, the tower eschews logs in favor of steel, but it sports an ecofriendly look, with its steel-grid skeleton wrapped in 2x6 Southern yellow pine. A heated glass room and observation deck crown the edifice, which has already achieved iconic status among kayakers in the region. Mason was able to convince the county to allow him to exceed the 20-foot height limitation by portraying the tower as a bird-watching lookout. Views from the top encompass several of Colorado's famous 14,000-foot peaks. "Every architect has a tower fantasy," says Mason, "and, compositionally, it's a wonderful thing to have a tall vertical element in a group of buildings."

A 13th-century painting of St. Jerome in his study sparked Mason's design for his recently completed studio for two. "Da Messina's painting shows St. Jerome at a desk that is like a piece of architecture within a larger space," Mason explains, "and I wanted to create that same impression." He did so by tucking a birch-plywood work center into each end of the 36-foot-long, 12-foot-wide room. Between the two stations, large windows and a glass door slice open much of one wall; in conjunction with a 22-foot-high peaked roof and glazed gables, the generous fenestration keeps the spruce-lined space bright and expansive.

Mason may not have started out with a plan to design an entire riverside settlement, but he's pleased with the results. Clearly, he's achieved his objective of creating a place that celebrates its surroundings. "You go to the mountains because you want to experience the air and the stars," Mason says. "It makes sense that you live in a series of buildings where it's a pleasure to constantly move back and forth and experience the environment."