Kirsten Molz always considered himself a beach man rather than a mountain man. But when her family rented a home in Park City, Utah, at the beginning of the pandemic, she reconsidered.
“I've always wanted a beach house,” said Maltz, 51, an interior designer who calls Pasadena, California, his home. That wish changed in June 2020 when he ran to Park City with two children, three family friends and three dogs.
“It was very beautiful here,” Maltz said. “I sat outside and saw hikers passing just above the Mid Mountain Trail and felt this feeling in my mind that I could live here.”
When she told her husband, “He called the agent within five minutes,” Maltz said. They dreamed of building a house that would serve as a villa for now.
After seeing several development lots, the couple settled on an eight-acre mountainside property with meadows surrounded by aspen trees and bought it for $2.5 million that September.
Maltz said he wanted a home that felt like the natural inclusive structure depicted in the 2014 film “Ex Machina,” imagining a house of refined modernism rather than a rustic lodge-style house.
Looking for an architect online, she discovered Sparano & Mooney Architecture. “When I saw their website, I thought, 'These guys can really do that,'” Maltz said.
She was happy to find a partner at Anne Mooney, the principal of the company. “We were really excited because it was a beautiful site and would be an eternal home,” Mooney said.
Over the next few months, Mooney and her team visited Lot several times and came up with a place to place their homes within the landscape to make the most of its natural beauty. “We were thinking about the site experience and this idea of forest bathing,” she said, describing the practice of reducing nature and experiencing it with all senses.
As a result, the company was embedded in the first floor of the 8,200-square-foot house on a hillside, pulling away from the top floor room and even opening the landscape.
“The house is stepping into the site and some important areas are connected by bridges,” Mooney said. “The bridges are glass and there are aspen trees on each side of you as you walk 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 garage with a muddy garage. The architects covered the rest of the pine siding and were thermally modified to enhance durability.
Inside, Maltz chose many walls and ceilings with white oak floors and cabinets, as well as gossy plaster in a creamy off-white colour. “I wanted it to feel warm, so when I'm here in the winter and it's cold outside, I never miss California,” she said.
She also built custom houses, and used the opportunity to build custom houses in the kitchen, including Matte Black Lacanche series, Griffin and Wong's hand-painted silk wallpapers, and hand-painted silk wallpapers depicting birds and flowering trees in the library. She also installed custom pool tables in the library from Cooper Reynolds Gross, a Los Angeles-based furniture manufacturer. This comes with a white oak top that doubles as a large dining table to entertain.
“There is no dedicated dining room,” Maltz said. “But you can have Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner there.”
For furniture, she mixed vintage mid-century modern pieces with contemporary upholstered items for the sink-in lounge, including oversized section sofas from upholstered refill hardware in Lawson Fenning's Nibby Fabric for the living room. She worked with Pasadena-based landscape architecture company EPT Design to design the hillsides around the house, including stone stairs from the main bedroom to the sauna.
After the invasion in June 2021, Upland Development completed construction in August 2023 at a cost of around $600 per square foot.
Now that she's enjoying the finished project, Maltz said she wouldn't change things if she had to start over. “To be honest, we can say that it surpasses our expectations in every way,” she said. “It's a great place for us all to come together and spend time together.”
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