Characteristic Lines
Uncharacteristic Results

mountain contemporary in greenhorn

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Architect: Jeffrey Charles Williams, A.I.A.-Williams Partners Architects P.C.
Builder: Jerry Hayward
Interior Design: Rob McGowan
Landscape Architect: Rob King-Clemens Associates, Inc.
Landscape Installation: All Seasons

Hidden off of Highway 75 and Golden Eagle Road, up a winding driveway near Greenhorn Gulch, the McGowan-O’Malley home is a harmonious fusion of rough with sleek, dark with light, natural with manmade.

Homeowner Rob McGowan calls the style “mountain contemporary.”

Differently textured building materials have been paired to play off of each other. Sandblasted grey concrete columns stand amid rich brown wood beams; clear, soaring windows overlook rusted corrugated steel roofing; warm cedar shingles abut rough-hewn concrete walls.

It’s a fresh twist on materials, and there’s no denying that the variety of textures, soft muted colors and bold and weathered materials create a richly layered look and add visual excitement to this one-year-old home.

“We wanted a contemporary design but not necessarily too modern. We wanted it to feel young, a little more on the hip side,” Rob says with a laugh.

McGowan and his wife Katherine O’Malley live here with their 3-year-old daughter Chloe, newborn son Peter, and their dog Friday, a Cavalier King Charles. The family moved to the Valley from Los Angeles in 2006. “We wanted to raise our kids here,” says McGowan, who spent his childhood here.

In spite of its picture-perfect design, this beautiful lakeside house is not just for show. Inside the sprawling cement, wood and glass structure is a home that is well used and loved by this young family. It clearly is not treated like a museum.

Evident throughout the house are traces of family gatherings and real living. Peek into O’Malley’s office and you might see a scattering of toys on the floor. In the media room, a blanket is tossed casually across the back of a sofa. Friday, the dog, has the run of the place.

To the observer, the absolute lived-in humanness of this showcase home is yet another delightful contrast.

McGowan and O’Malley worked with Ketchum architect Jeffrey Williams to design and build the home, a process that took about two years. Williams said the job went very smoothly, thanks in great part to the owners knowing what they wanted.

“They seemed very educated about what they were after,” says Williams. “They brought in a lot of photos from architects whose work I knew and really liked. Rob told me that at one point he put it all in Katherine’s hands because he wanted to make sure she could work comfortably with whoever they picked to build it.”

McGowan says that Williams was “fantastic” to work with and that the team had “good symmetry.”

While this isn’t the first contemporary-styled home that Williams has built in the Wood River Valley, he says others featured more rustic elements that are more typical of the area.

“In the past, whenever we suggested doing something contemporary, people would be horrified, like ‘that look doesn’t work in the mountains.’ I think what they envisioned was white boxes, and contemporary doesn’t mean that at all,” he notes.

Far from a white box, the McGowan-O’Malley home is designed in a long, flowing U-shape and features floor-to-ceiling windows throughout. In fact, one of the first things you notice is that you can look right through the house from front to back.

“The idea was to build the house so you can see through it to both the lake side and the canyon side,” says McGowan, referring to the close-by hills of Greenhorn Gulch and the lake that sits in his backyard.

At the front of the home, the couple planted natural grasses that are delicately soft against the home’s strong lines. “We wanted to be friendly to the area,” McGowan says of the plantings. “Kind of like the house just landed there and we’re letting the grass grow up around it.”

Several terraces of varying sizes and shapes surround the house, each coming off a different area of the house and each offering its own unique atmosphere, sunlight and view. A primary terrace situated off the pool area features a large courtyard fireplace, which serves as the symbolic center of the home and the focal point of the angled-wing design. The stone that Williams has used on the terraces originates in Montana and was chosen for its earthy color tones and its pleasant, coarse texture. >>>