Artists home and studios in Colorados San Juan mountains

My wife Susan is a painter while I am a sculptor and together we have created our home and studio spaces, integrated into a hillside of massive boulders at the foot of Colorado’s San Juan mountains. This has been a 20 year process, starting with a small Japanese style timber frame yoga pagoda and culminating in Susan’s cubist painting studio.
We worked with architect Connie Gordon on some design aspects of the house and its engineering, deciding to keep most of the house profile low, sheltering it within the contours of the hillside. Because the house is long and narrow, there are simultaneous views of the mountains to the west and the boulder garden in the backyard. It features a circular living room roof and conical stone chimney, with significant formed concrete elements such as the front porch column and a 2 story buttress we named the movie marquee. We wanted the retaining walls of the front porch to have a very wide profile so we encased stacks of used tires in board formed concrete. I also designed and constructed numerous concrete stairways into the terraced landscape along with rainwater basins. One of our small buildings is board formed concrete with a parabolic curved roof, evoking the work of Mexican architect Felix Candela. Susans parents were inspired by modern design and in the 50’s were able to purchase a modest house in the visionary community of Hollin Hills, designed by architect Charles Goodman just outside of Washington D.C. We have inherited their collection of modernist furniture and have the Eames fiberglass rocker that Susan was nursed in. Our vision was to create a home with solid bones, rooted and nurtured by its surroundings, melding a range of design concepts into a dynamic home/studio environment.