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Aspen Sojourner / Mountain Homestyle / Holiday 2008 / Brilliantly Fabricated

Brilliantly Fabricated

Of his cabin at Lazy O Ranch in Old Snowmass, Kurt Malkoff says, “You have to go all in if something like this is going to work.” When you first see the structure, you might assume you understand why. Surely the quaint, stacked-timber cabin could not have been so perfectly preserved. It must have taken considerable wherewithal, not to mention a profound dedication to a bygone aesthetic, to restore such an antiquated structure to a habitable state.

In thinking that—and even the most educated eye usually does—you would be only half right. True, the Malkoffs were deeply committed to the cabin’s rustic look. But they did not restore it; they built it from scratch.

To achieve such an authentic-looking visual narrative, the Malkoffs first scripted a false one on paper. Here’s how it goes: First, in 1931, a single 20-by-20-foot cabin was built. Later, the master bedroom was added to the south and the roof was raised for more volume and to accommodate a loft. In 1934, a four-seasons porch and breezeway were tacked on. In 1938, a garage was built. Look at the structure and it all sounds entirely plausible. In reality, the whole cabin was completed in late 2007.

Because the faux narrative’s broken chronology would have amounted to “discontinuous architecture” or “a home by accretion,” as Kurt Malkoff describes it, the architects and builders incorporated different ages of materials—the great majority reclaimed—and dissimilar construction techniques in building it. The 10-by-10-inch stacked reclaimed timbers that make up the walls of the “original” cabin give way to reclaimed barn wood that was added to create the loft. The different materials create what the Malkoffs refer to as “temporal breaks” in the structural narrative, though in actuality the construction was continuous. Three distinct types of corrugated metal roofing—reclaimed from Colorado and Ohio—further suggest distinct eras of construction.

“It’s meant to look like a collision of forms, to look like it came together over time,” says project manager Steve Dunn of Reno/Smith Architects, who, along with principal architect Augie Reno, AIA, contractor Duane Stewart and interior designer David Berg, helped the Malkoffs realize their vision. “The home’s masses collide together like they weren’t completely thought out. There’s not a whole lot of order in this house.” But, as Malkoff adds, “It was very time-consuming and expensive to look this disordered.”

Of course, concessions to modernity do exist—but they’re all very well hidden. “The house looks like it’s sitting on the ground,” Dunn says, “but there are really 30-foot caissons sunk into the earth. There’s a lot of clay in that part of our valley; the clay heaves.”

There are no gutters visible outside; roofs of the Malkoff narrative’s era would have shed water. But the cabin does have gutters. The one over the entry is a log lined with copper, keeping it out of sight.

Similarly deceptive is the garage door, which looks like it opens sideways like an old barn door. Press a button, however, and it opens vertically, as modern garage doors do.

Things look and feel every bit as authentic when you enter the home.

“We tell our guests, ‘You want to keep your shoes on, because you can get splinters. You’re walking on 90-year-old reclaimed, scuffed flooring,’” Kurt Malkoff says. “Because if you have reclaimed logs, you need the reclaimed flooring. If you break the path of authenticity, you break the narrative.” That’s what the Malkoffs mean by “going all in.”

Inside, persuasive details are everywhere—and all of them have a story. Take the kitchen: Reclaimed vegetable and fruit crates were fashioned into cabinetry. The shelves have no doors, because, as Dunn observes, “the utilitarianism of the era wouldn’t have had them.” The wall above the stove and countertops is a reclaimed slate chalkboard. The countertops themselves are covered with hammered zinc. The pantry sits behind a 1935 reclaimed screen door displaying a stenciled ad for “Miami Maid Bread—The Taste of Every Home.”

Of the reclaimed barn wood used throughout the cabin, Dunn set aside the most reddish pieces for the kitchen. (He paneled the refrigerator with them, too.) The red helps demarcate the space but also accomplishes something else: The choice of setting aside the red wood for a specific purpose lends the kitchen the feel of room pieced together from practical decisions born of the era. It looks right, but, more significantly, it feels real.

Flour sacks—yes, flour sacks—are used as curtains for the kitchen windows. It’s a hallmark of the Malkoff cabin: ingenious window coverings. In the master bathroom, they are Native American blankets with steel bars running through each end; the curtains are manually raised and lowered on hooks. For the windows in the living area, billiard-table covers do the job. For the large windows in the four-seasons porch, canvas roll-ups, similar to what one would find in a large tent, are adjusted by ropes that pass through ceramic rings. “It’s so simple it’s exquisite,” Malkoff says.

Most remarkable about all the quirky details of the Malkoff cabin—and “there’s a design element every 15 inches,” as Kurt Malkoff says—is that not one feels remotely hackneyed or trite. In part, this is because of the years of time and effort the Malkoffs spent amassing and storing many of the cabin’s furnishings. And that, in turn, was a result of the single greatest factor informing the design process from its earliest conceptual stages: the Malkoffs themselves.

Kurt Malkoff, a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and owner of Matrix Psychological Services, says his desire to embark on such a committed architectural journey traces to his childhood. Malkoff’s parents collected and stored furnishings for 14 years before incorporating them into their dream home. As Malkoff says, when he was six years old he left for school in Youngstown, Ohio, from a “two-bedroom modest apartment and came home at lunch to a 4,000-square-foot palace.” The home was not large by today’s standards, Malkoff notes, but the caliber of the work and furnishings—and the thoughtfulness and deliberateness with which his parents pursued the process of realizing it—left a lasting impression. (As did living in the home, which Malkoff did for 19 years.)

Leslie Malkoff has her own history of thoughtful design. For 20 years, she was the director of visual merchandising for the Limited stores, and in 2001 she started her own visual merchandising business, Visualopathy, which has assisted clients such as Starbucks, REI and several museums, conservatories and botanical gardens in creating retail spaces that better “appeal to customers’ comfort level and senses.”
Doing so has given her a singular  insight into how people interact with spaces, and it’s one that, though spoken about her professional design philosophy, could just as well apply to the effect she and her husband achieved with their cabin: “It’s all about the experience,” she says. 

All of the tracking down of eclectic curios—the 1920s Wonder Bread grocery-store counter the Malkoffs converted into a dining room table; the 1926 canoe hanging in the breezeway; the 19th century gas lighting fixtures that have  been electrified; the coffee table made from an old tobacco cart/scale from the late ’20s; and even the bits of whimsy like the lamp fashioned of a 1940s dressmaker’s form draped in a genuine Civil War jacket—has amounted to a remarkably original aesthetic experience but also a palpably emotional one.

“There isn’t a space that doesn’t have a sense of peace,” Kurt Malkoff says. “It’s the most peaceful place I’ve ever been. The smallness and scale create a psychological comfort. The cabin embraces you. You physically have to be there to experience it.”

Fortunately for the Malkoffs, their soulful journey will not end with the cabin. The 1,200-square-foot structure is a guesthouse. A main residence almost four times the size will follow—but in due course. True to the narrative they created, the Malkoffs will spend time living in the guest cabin before beginning the main structure.

“We love the journey,” Kurt Malkoff says. “If you build it this way, you milk the journey. It’s an episodic, discontinuous experience. This project continues to give us an emotional high.”