Of Llamas, Churches and Trees
Three young families create their dream homes.
PHOTOGRAPHY Mark Oliver
Andy and JaNessa Gilbert’s mid-Valley home was once a working llama stable. Today, the living room floor is a patchwork of simple Masonite panels
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If only remodeling a home was like molding clay. Beat, stretch, shape and—voilà!—an abstract vision achieved in one therapeutic day. Reality is a different story. There are constraints posed by foundation footprints, bizarre antique layouts, environmental concerns and engineering puzzles. Visions for a property’s potential can be big, but the ambitious homeowner’s skills (and finances) are often stretched thin. Add the stress of starting a new family, and even the successful remodel can seem like man versus manor. Undaunted by such challenges, three stalwart and inspired Blaine County families have carved, sanded and soldered Western dream homes from the relics they once were.
The Treehouse
Billy Mann wanted to honor the forest wood that comprises, surrounds and, in winters’ past, heated his family home.
Prior to remodeling his log cabin north of Ketchum, Billy Mann burned seven or eight cords of firewood each winter. The hours he spent collecting the wood and preparing for central Idaho’s frigid winters sparked his imagination. The forest fueled his visions for a one-of-a-kind log home.
Wrestling with questions of consumption and sustainability, Mann and his wife, Tifney Stewart, elected to capture more than the forest’s carbon output. Through two years of painstaking workmanship, the couple transformed their cabin into an environmentally responsible woodworker’s treasure.
Having visited the Wood River Valley throughout their lives, Mann and Stewart pulled up stakes in California in 2000 and aimed for central Idaho’s abundant elbowroom, more lenient leash laws and inspiring natural resources and vistas.
“We said, ‘Let’s go back to Idaho, the land of not so many rules, no ticks or fleas,’” Stewart said. “We have single-track trails right off the corner of our land—a big piece of land with a sweet little house.”
While searching for firewood on an undisclosed ridge in the Boulder Mountains, Mann discovered one hundred acres of dead whitebark pine. “Almost all of them had been killed by pine beetles and had been dead-standing for three to five years,” he recalled.
Armed with a permit from the U.S. Forest Service, Mann eyed specific trees for use in the ambitious renovation. Some were peeling, and, in spots where rainwater had been trapped between bark and wood, mold had left behind beautiful blue striations. These recycled, blue-striped whitebark pines would eventually become the gnarled posts and lintels of his dream home.
As he allowed such organic discoveries to dictate various facets of his remodel, Mann found inspiration in other unlikely places. Reading a copy of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, to his children—Ry, two, and Elle, seven—he had a vision. With the salvaged evergreens and his deft woodworking skills, Mann would build a fantastic storybook space. The rooms would resemble drawings and dreams rather than the humdrum norms of a typical suburban home.
a pine bannister leads to upstairs bedrooms; Billy Mann and family sit atop a bunk bed perch in daughter Elle’s room; a barn-style sliding door encloses a second-floor bathroom.
He saved one of his most imaginative ideas for Elle’s second-story room. A ladder propped next to her soaring bunk bed leads to an even higher perch, a lofty garret tucked under the ceiling like a treehouse’s secret passageway.
“Maybe it’s what I wanted as a kid,” Mann mused.
A cozy guest room at the top of a wild-hewn fir stairway banister is another testament to Mann’s imagination and ingenuity. Connecting with the handiwork, running your hand slowly along the knotty rises, evokes a childlike wonder. How did he do this?
Wild imagination may have fueled the charm of Mann’s remodel, but without technical know-how the project could have never begun. As a kid in North Carolina, Mann hung around his two grandfathers’ woodworking shops and later took on carpentry jobs between college and graduate school. Once in Idaho, he built Elle a custom treehouse and was so pleased with the result, he took out a classified in the local paper selling his skills. In the months that followed, he built four more backyard log treehouses. He didn’t know it at the time, but each was a study for his ultimate project.
how he imagined using them
in his budding renovation.
Once into the remodel, Mann consistently raised the bar of ambition. When he wanted some extra space, he squared the cabin’s original L-shape structure using classic mortise and tenon joinery and shifted an entire wall like so many toy Lincoln Logs. The transferred wall fit its mate like the teeth of a zipper, leaving no discernible signs of the operation, but plenty of extra room to wander.
“We only added a little space, but we maximized what we had,” Stewart said.
Of the many challenges faced, wall surgery was at least anticipated. Before the cabin’s transformation even began, basement sump pump alarms alerted Mann to a subterranean stream running beneath his foundation. A new drainage system became the first of the home’s extensive remodels.
Six years later, in mid-renovation, the Castle Rock Fire swept through the hills above Hulen Meadows, and for a few nervous days it seemed as though Mann’s storybook visions would go up in smoke.
“With all the material I had leaning against the house, it looked like a bonfire ready to go,” Mann said. “I even had 25-year-old shakes on the roof.”
He recalled the pessimistic expression on a firefighter’s face during the neighborhood evacuation. “He shook his head and said, ‘Dude, you’re toast.’”
But the Castle Rock Fire changed course that night, and the cabin’s metamorphosis continued unimpeded. When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, Mann launched a new company, Sagebrush Solar. He outfitted the cabin with a system to provide hot water and radiant heat year-round. Surrounded by locally harvested wood finished in non-toxic varnishes, Mann has achieved a sustainable building maxim: “The idea is to build a home like a bird builds a nest, with materials that are local and natural and non-toxic,” he said. In his masterpiece treehouse, Mann found ways to incorporate and mimic nature, rather than merely use it. >>>
For more pictures of the Mann home click here
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