Sweet spots: three tasteful explorations into the meaning of a second home

Residential Architect, July, 2004 by Shelley D. Hutchins, Meghan Drueding

With all of its functional, no-frills building elements and the tedium of sheetrock walls, the house needed a jolt of pizzazz to come alive for both the owner and the architect. "The site is so dark and the materials so straightforward," says Prentiss, "that we needed to do something to add panache." The low-tech, cost-effective answer: paint. A light chartreuse jazzes up the kitchen and living room, while coats of peach and tangerine give the master bedroom a lift. Even the hallway picked up yellow walls and multicolored skylight shafts. The effect is so exuberant, unexpected, and delightful, it's a shame Prentiss can't also see inside the house from his spot across the water.--m.d.

project: Lopez Island cabin, Lopez Island, Wash.

architect: Prentiss Architects, Seattle

general contractor: Ravenhill Construction, Friday Harbor, Wash.

project size: 1,350 square feet

construction cost: Withheld

photographer: Steve Keating

peak performance

though second homes tend to be more freewheeling than full-time houses, they generally still require certain core elements--living room, master bedroom, storage spaces. Not this nifty little project in downtown Jackson, Wyo. Its owners already possessed a renovated vacation cabin that fulfilled those basic requirements. So they bought a new lot just across an alley from their existing house and asked Stephen Dynia, AIA, to create an all-purpose studio where they could work, entertain, and put up overnight guests.

Dynia took his golden opportunity and ran with it. "The clients were more interested in progressive architecture for the new building," he says. "They liked the contrast with their old cabin." But neither they nor he wanted to stray too far from the collection of small-scale bungalows, shacks, and cabins that make up this mountain town's built context. "The objective was to come up with something not entirely radical for the neighborhood that would still be a new interpretation," he says.

He devised a straightforward building whose long, narrow dimensions fit its 50-by-150-foot site. A gently peaked, rusted, standing-seam steel roof tops walls clad in sheet metal panels and 1-by-10-foot cedar boards. Sandwiched between the 1-by-10s are 2-by-2-inch cedar strips that form snow-collecting ridges. In winter the ridges line the exterior with white stripes, a subtle reference to the chinking of local log structures.

The front door opens into a two-story atrium, where a custom open-riser stair leads to the window-lined, loft-like second level, the studio's main entertaining and working space. A modest kitchen, sitting area, and game room fill out the ground floor. And over the front door juts the element that pulls the whole composition together: a bedroom volume clad inside and out in rusted steel. Dynia elevated it 3 1/2 feet above the second floor so it stands out against the rest of the building. "The small bedroom piece pays homage to the idea of the little storage buildings in the alleys of Jackson," he says. Lifting it slightly gave its occupants a measure of privacy, and something even more precious: a view of the snowcapped Grand Teton mountain peak.--m.d.