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Sun Valley Home and Design / Spring 2008 / To Each His or Her Own

To Each His or Her Own

Even Pros Struggle at Times to Create Their Dream Homes

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There are some professions where being your own client just doesn’t work. If you were a dentist, would you fill your own cavity? But for architects, the opportunity for unadulterated self-expression not only proves a satiating outlet, but also a chance to perfect their skills at listening to a client’s needs, limits and desires while fashioning a most personal asset.

Tobin Dougherty – Contemporary Eye

Before Tobin Dougherty even stenciled out his plans for the home he was planning along River Run Drive in Ketchum 14 years ago, he got up on a ladder and checked out the views.

Then he built his house to take them in, making the indoors feel as large as the outdoors.

“Everything I do as an architect has a very open, airy sense,” says Dougherty, an architect with a Ketchum office and another in Palo Alto, California. “I want every room to be part of the view.”

In the process of aligning his new house off Warm Springs Road, he discovered views of Durrance Peak and the Devil’s Bedstead that were hidden from street level.

“You wouldn’t know this had those views,” says Lexi Dougherty, Tobin’s wife. “He knew it was there.”

Dougherty, a designer of contemporary buildings, both houses and commercial spaces such as the AmericInn in Hailey and the new Village Complex under construction in downtown Hailey, likes to be surrounded in views. In his home, he and his wife can look into the night sky and see stars with great ease.

He exposes structural elements in a building as a guide to the human eye.

“The interior ceiling is to encourage your eye toward a view,” Dougherty says. “Most people don’t realize this is what they are going to find in this upstairs living space.”

Dougherty’s passion has always been putting out modern designs that work with how the sun and light enter a space and warm it.

Designing his first home at age 17, in the Gold Rush areas around Nevada City, Calif., he put design and creativity first.

“With geometry and wall shifts, you can see through one space into another,” he says. “I personally create modern design that is warm, defined and comfortable while being open. I’ve spent my entire career putting warmth into modern design.”

His staircase into the upstairs tricks the eye a little and dramatically pulls a person to the upper floor. On the climb up, it opens to a view of the Frenchman’s area on Baldy.

Dougherty says he thinks of a house like a sculpture or a puzzle balanced by different shapes in relation to each other.

“Instead of just creating a gable roof, you have shapes playing with each other,” he says.

In his house, a visible piece of structural steel inside is meant to pull the eye and balance a large area of empty space, for instance.

Designed to focus the real living space on the upper floor, Dougherty’s house has the master bedroom, kitchen, dining room and living room on the second floor where the views are. Bedrooms are downstairs with easy access to a colorful garden and large patio. Overall, the house imitates the natural world with its sky above and ground below.

When you are upstairs, all views are framed and other houses aren’t visible.

“You wouldn’t know we had neighbors,” Dougherty says.

The neighbors have vanished because the windows cleverly face mountain views of Griffin Butte, a ridge on Bald Mountain and the thrust of Heidelberg Hill.

A private world has been created in the upstairs of the Dougherty house. Solid comfort is tangible with radiant heat concrete floors that beg for bare feet and a fabulous sound system.

For 30 years, Dougherty has worked within several categories of modernism. During that time, he elevated his skills to produce structures that are warm, functional and creative at the same time. Every one is an individual work of art. >>>