Kirsten Mellen always considered himself a beach person as a mountain person. But when her family rented a house in Park City, Utah, she thought about.
“I always wanted an ocean house,” said Ms. Molz, 51, a interior designer, which calls Pasadena, California, at home. This wish changed when she and her husband fled to Park City in June 2020 with two of their children, three family friends and three dogs.
“It was so nice here,” said Ms. Mellen. “I was sitting outside, directly over the mid-mountain trail and watching how hikers walking, and I only had the feeling in my heart that I could live here.”
When she said to her husband: “He called an agent within five minutes,” said Ms. Mellen.
After the couple had seen a few development plots, the couple got involved in an eight hectare mountain ownership with a meadow surrounded by Aspen trees they bought in September for $ 2.5 million.
Ms. Molz came up with a slim, modernist house and not about a rustic house in lodge style and said she wanted a residence that felt a little like the natural embring structure depicted in the film “Ex Machina”.
In search of architects online, she discovered Sparano & Mooney Architecture. “When I saw her website, I thought: 'These boys could really do that,” said Ms. Molz.
She found a willing partner in Anne Mooney, a headmistress of the company. “We were very excited because it was a beautiful side and it would be a home forever,” said Ms. Mooney.
In the following months, Ms. Mooney and her team visited the property a few times and considered where the house is to be placed in the landscape in order to use its natural beauty. “We thought about the experience of the website and this idea of the forest pool,” she said, describing the practice of slowing down nature with all your senses and experiencing nature.
As a result, the company anchored the ground floor of the 8,200 square meter house in the hill and pulled the rooms of the upper floor apart to open it to the landscape.
“The house appears with the location and some of the key areas are connected to bridges”, which act as sunny corridors, said Ms. Mooney. “The bridges are glass and they have the Aspen trees on both sides from them while they walk through them. So they feel part of this forest experience.”
In particular, a glass bridge connects the main living room with the primary suite. Another connects the entrance hall with the mud room and the garage. The architects disguised the rest of the exterior in pine cladding, which was thermally modified in order to increase its durability.
Inside, Ms. Mol chose the white oak floors and the cupboards as well as a gauze plaster in a creamy, creamy color for many walls and blankets. “I wanted it to feel warm, so when I am here in winter and it is cold outside, I won't miss California,” she said.
She also took the opportunity to build an individual house to acquire special pieces that she had admired for a long time, including a matt black lacche range for the kitchen and a hand-painted silk wallpaper by Griffin & Wong, the birds and flowering trees for the library. She also installed a custom billiard table from the furniture manufacturer Cooper Reynolds Gross in the library based in Los Angeles, which is equipped with a white oak top with which he can serve as a large dining table for entertainment.
“We don't have a special dining room,” said Ms. Mol, “but we can have Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner there.”
For furniture, she mixed modern pieces from the middle of the century with contemporary padded objects for the sink-in-fist, including an oversized section sheet of restoration hardware and swivel chairs, which were padded by Lawson-Fenning for the living room in Nubby fabric. She worked with the landscape architecture firm EPT Design based in Pasadena to design the hill around the house, including stone levels from the main bedroom to the sauna.
After breaking in June 2021, the development of highlands ended in August 2023 at a price of around $ 600 per square foot.
When Ms. Mol enjoyed the finished project, she said she wouldn't change anything if she had to do everything again. “I can honestly say that it has exceeded our expectations in every respect,” she said, adding that it is a home that her children also like to come back to. “It's just a perfect place for all of us to gather and spend time together.”
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