Colorado Rustic
Rick Mueller and Tedd Benson were high school friends back in the mid-60s. After graduating, however, they went their separate ways. Today, Rick is a commercial developer in the Vail, Colorado, area. When he and his wife, Rita, decided to build their dream home in Edwards, Rick began to search for the right builder. It was while reading an article about timberframe homes in Builder magazine that Rick ran across the name Tedd Benson. "How many Tedd Bensons with two Ds in their name could there be?" Rick asked himself.
Because he always liked the style of timberframe homes, he gave Tedd Benson a call. Sure enough, it was his old high school friend.
Timber "spokes" radiating from the center above the copper clad circular dining room table form a wheel that pushes into the homes great room. A thick curved wall accommodates art niches along the circular stair well.
Impressed with their shop and the many homes Bensonwood had designed and built, Rick set about hiring Bensonwood to build his home. "I've worked with a lot of architects and engineers, so I was planning on doing the design with some of my own people," Rick said. "But it became apparent that Bensonwood had full-service architectural and engineering services in-house, so I decided to go with them."
Rick wanted to combine the elements of a contemporary home with the older look and feel of recycled timbers. "I was impressed with how creative they could be with such a traditional form of homebuilding," he said.
Because Rick's budget couldn't accommodate resawn and planed reclaimed timbers, he wanted to use Douglas fir, stained to look like old timbers. "Bensonwood had never done this before and they were worried that they might check over time to reveal unstained areas," Rick said. "But we've been in the house for two-and-a-half years and the timbers all look fine."
"Rick knows everything about building and he absolutely loves the architectural process," said Randall Walter, Bensonwood's lead architect on the project. Randall describes Rick as an architect's dream client because any sentence he started with: "It would be really great if we..." Rick would always say, "Let's do it."
Rick also had some pretty intriguing ideas--one of which was to initiate the design process around their circular, copper clad dining room table. "Randall came up with a large timber wheel with spokes radiating from the center above the table," Rick said. "Because we didn't want posts on the first floor, he suspended the entire wheel from the roof timbers." One end of the wheel's circumference pushes into the home's greatroom and serves as the support for a loft on the second floor. It's reached via a curved stairway wrapping up along the rim of the wheel.
The 4,200 sq. ft. home is nestled into a valley and looks toward New York Mountain and Finnigan's Peak. To make the tops of the 13,000-foot peaks visible from the great room, its gable climbs four feet from north to south. The result is a window wall twenty nine feet tall , with expansive mountain views from the first and second floors. Normally, the gable would need a large timber to tie its two sides together. But that would have cut into a major portion of the view. To get around this challenge, the Bensonwood engineering team substituted a steel rod to tie the sides together, then the rod was surrounded by a much smaller timber, leaving the view intact.
"The home has a lot of details and creative framing which took time to design," Randall said. Because the home was designed using Bensonwood's Open-Built® system, design time and cost was saved on the overall design by selecting digitally-based room volumes for the wings of the home (which contain the bedrooms and bathrooms). Because these volumes are stored in a digital catalog, they can be called up and quickly resized to fit any design. "That freed up a lot of the design budget to spend on the more visible areas of the house, such as the wheel structure," Randall explained.
A wall in the daughter's bedroom steps back to form a shelf where a collection of stuffed animals reside.
Wall design was another important aspect of the home. Thick curved walls below the stairs in the dining area contain built-in art niches that lend sophistication to the home's rustic nature. "Because the frame holds up the entire structure in a timberframe home, none of the walls need to be load bearing," Randall said. "That frees you up to make some elegant design choices with expressive walls." For example, in the bedroom of the Mueller's daughter, Randall designed a wall that rises about eight feet and then steps back a couple feet to form a dramatically lit ledge where dozens of large stuffed animals have taken up residence.
"We entertain family and friends here regularly," said Rick. "Virtually everyone who spends any time here says it is the most relaxing, comfortable home they've ever been in."
Once the timberframe shell and other elements were on the site, it took the Bensonwood team about eight days to have the whole house closed in. "That was amazing," said Rick. "I'm used to seeing traditional framing where workers bash, kick and beat things into place. The craftsmanship and attention to detail as the frame went up was incredible.
"I always remembered that Tedd was the most honest, straightforward guy I had ever met. I don't think he or I knew he would become a builder of these incredible homes, but it sure worked out great for us."