Kirsten Molz always thought of herself as a beach person more than a mountain person. But when her family rented a house in Park City, Utah, at the beginning of the pandemic, she reconsidered.
“I always wanted an ocean house,” said Ms. Molz, 51, an interior designer who calls Pasadena, Calif., home. That wish changed when she and her husband escaped to Park City in June 2020 with two of their children, three family friends and three dogs.
“It was so beautiful here,” Ms. Molz said. “I sat outside, right over the mid-mountain trail, watching hikers go by, and I just had this feeling in my heart that I could live here.”
When she told her husband, “he called an agent within five minutes,” Ms. Molz said.They dreamed of building a house that could serve as a vacation home for now and perhaps a retirement home in the future, as well as a place that their grown children — Emma, 28, Charlie, 26 and Ollie, 20 — would want to visit regularly.
After seeing a few development lots, the couple settled on an eight-acre mountainside property with a meadow surrounded by aspen trees, which they bought for $2.5 million that September.
Envisioning a sleek, modernist house rather than a rustic lodge-style home, Ms. Molz said she wanted a residence that felt a little like the nature-embracing structure depicted in the 2014 movie “Ex Machina.”
Searching for architects online, she discovered Sparano & Mooney Architecture. “When I saw their website, I thought, ‘These guys could really do that,’” Ms. Molz said.
She found a willing partner in Anne Mooney, a principal at the firm. “We were really excited because it was a beautiful site and it was going to be a forever home,” Ms. Mooney said.
Over the following months, Ms. Mooney and her team visited the lot a few times, contemplating where to place the house in the landscape to take maximum advantage of its natural beauty. “We were thinking about the experience of the site and this idea of forest bathing,” she said, describing the practice of slowing down and experiencing nature with all the senses.
As a result, the firm embedded the ground floor of the 8,200-square-foot house in the hillside and pulled apart the rooms of the top floor to open them up to the landscape.
“The house steps up with the site and some of the key areas are connected by bridges,” which function as sunny hallways, Ms. Mooney said. “The bridges are glass and you have the aspen trees on both sides of you as you’re walking through them, so you feel like you’re part of that forest experience.”
Specifically, one glass bridge links the main living space to the primary suite; another connects the entrance hall to the mudroom and garage. The architects clad the rest of the exterior in pine siding, which was thermally modified to increase its durability.
Inside, Ms. Molz chose white oak flooring and cabinetry, and gauzy plaster in a creamy off-white color for many of the walls and ceilings. “I wanted it to feel warm so that when I’m here in the winter and it’s cold outside, I won’t be missing California,” she said.
She also used the opportunity of building a custom house to acquire special pieces she had long admired, including a matte black Lacanche range for the kitchen and hand-painted silk wallpaper from Griffin & Wong depicting birds and flowering trees for the library. She also installed a custom pool table from the Los Angeles-based furniture maker Cooper Reynolds Gross in the library, which comes with a white-oak top that allows it to double as a large-scale dining table for entertaining.
“We don’t have a dedicated dining room,” Ms. Molz said, “but we can have Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner in there.”
For furniture, she mixed vintage midcentury modern pieces with contemporary upholstered items for sink-in lounging, including an oversized sectional sofa from Restoration Hardware and swivel chairs upholstered in nubby fabric from Lawson-Fenning for the living room. She worked with the Pasadena-based landscape architecture firm EPT Design to design the hillside around the house, including stone steps from the primary bedroom to the sauna.
After breaking ground in June 2021, Upland Development completed construction in August 2023 at a cost of about $600 per square foot.
Now enjoying the finished project, Ms. Molz said she wouldn’t change a thing if she had to do it all over again. “I can honestly say that it has outstripped our expectations, pretty much in every way,” she said, adding that it’s a home her children also love coming back to. “It’s just a perfect place for us all to congregate and spend time together.”
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