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March 11, 2010

Simply inspired

A Park City couple creates a serene mountain retreat

A place for everything and everything in its place. The old adage is an apt description of Joan Childs’ and Jerry Zaret’s modern, Shaker-inspired Park City-area home. But rather than control-driven neatness, the couple’s home, guest cabin and barn are orderly in the way, say, the Amish are neat: springing from the philosophy that too much stuff is a distraction from what really matters. For Childs and Zaret, the neatness, the modern austerity and having a place for everything is a means to living a simply rich life.

The couple first visited Utah a few weeks before the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. They had previously retired from New York to one of their favorite vacation locales, Telluride, Colo. But as diehard skiers, they were getting impatient for the illusory big dump. “After being there for five years, we kept waiting to measure snow fall in feet rather than inches, but it never happened. We’d heard about the snow in Utah, but didn’t believe it. So we decided to check it out for ourselves,” Zaret says.

The day after they arrived in Park City, a foot of snow fell, and the couple immediately started talking about relocating. “It was love at first sight, but with the liquor laws and politics I thought, ‘Can I really live in Utah?’” Childs says. Telling themselves the idyllic snow conditions could be an anomaly, they decided to make a second trip in March. The snow was even better. Despite other concerns, they were hooked.

Prior to retirement, Childs and Zaret were longtime residents of New York City’s über-hip Tribeca neighborhood. Then they moved to Telluride for the mountain town’s funky, urban vibe. But when relocating to Utah, the couple decided to build well outside of Park City proper on an eight-and-a-half-acre, ski-in, ski-out lot surrounded by pine trees and wildflowers. “We thought, as long as we were going to live in the mountains, it didn’t make much sense to be looking in someone else’s windows,” Zaret says.

The couple described their design approach as vernacular architecture with a focus on simplicity and serenity. “We think architecture should reflect the history of where you are,” Childs says. They discovered that the land on which their home now sits had previously been used as summer pastoral grounds. And, of course, Park City is one of the West’s best known turn-of-the-century silver mining outposts. The duo melded this twofold past by pairing a version of the historically agricultural-inspired Shaker style with subtle industrial elements, reminiscent of silver mining.

“The Shaker style is full of logic and function that we really like, but we wanted to contemporize it. We didn’t want anything too stark or austere,” Childs says. “You won’t find a chair hanging on the wall here,” Zaret adds.

The couple, involved in every aspect of the design process, hired Park City’s Jack Thomas Associates because of the firm’s ability to embrace their notion of historically based architecture. “Our concept for the site was to create a farmstead feel, using a series of rectangular forms that incorporated a silo. We leveraged the flat area of the site in order to make the structures feel like they have been here for years,” Thomas says.

Having such plugged-in, design-savvy clients made the process much more interesting for both Thomas and his associate, Constantino “Tino” Grandjacquet, who now heads his own Park City firm, Summa Ars Architects. “The design objective all along was to create a compound that was elegant and subtle, stripped of all unnecessary design elements, while maintaining its richness and integrity,” Grandjacquet says.

The home’s roofline distinguishes it most immediately from many of the other houses in the area. Rather than a study in layered angles, the Childs/Zaret home, barn and guest cabin are reminiscent of a child’s drawing: a simple, pitched roof topping two vertical walls. The literal and figurative heart of the home is the silo—a cylindrical, two-level space housing the foyer and a beautifully simple stairwell joining the upper and lower levels. Living areas radiate out from the silo on a precise north-south, east-west axis.

“On the east side is the kitchen. And then on the west side is a patio where we enjoy cocktails in the evening. It just makes me feel good to live in a home anchored on the Earth’s magnetic poles,” Childs says.

Windows, both in number and size, provide another constant in the home’s architectural design. The couple chose windows smaller than the more typical floor-to-ceiling versions found in other mountain homes. And in every room, the windows are grouped in threes.

“Three means balance. And we feel like small windows offer different perspectives of the same view, and invite you outdoors to participate in what’s going on out there. Large windows encourage you to stay indoors and be a spectator,” Childs says.

The couple hired Sharron Lewis to help them create a serene, modern Shaker-influenced design theme. The team chose just two interior wall colors, dark wood and dyed cement flooring, and texture-rich furnishings. “We modernized the Shaker theme by throwing in pops of color, as in a bright red area rug in the library, where you wouldn’t expect it. The result is a very clean and simply elegant design that you wouldn’t expect in a mountain home,” Lewis says. For the guest cabin, they took a more whimsical approach, giving it a hip, 1940s fishing theme.

With the property zoned as equine acreage, Joan and Jerry initially outfitted it with a barn and corral. But rather than keeping horses, the barn’s entire first level houses Jerry’s hobby-cum-obsession, model train building. Jerry’s vast collection of buildings, countryside and trains is dubbed the Stillson River Railroad (Stillson being Childs’ middle name), and the name is painted high on the barn’s exterior.

To complement their compound, the couple jokes about adding a general store to its little slice of simple and serene Shangri-La. “So I can get eggs and milk,” smiles Childs, who loves to bake. In the meantime, it would seem as if their move to Utah has paid off in spades: more than 350 inches of snow fell on their side of the mountain last winter, providing a season of powder days, time with the trains and luxurious, self-imposed solitude.

See more photos and get tips for simple decor: click here!
 

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