Welcome to the Wild Wild West
Meet the Foxtail Residence and Its Clever Design
This Montana home deserves some serious accolades. With creative owners and a skilled Architect, the dream of living in the ‘wild wild west’ was actually achieved. They used reclaimed materials as well as local Montana materials, and stonework that’s simply extraordinary. Mosey on down and take a look-see!
It was important to the owners that their new home in Big Sky, Montana felt quintessentially Western. And none of this mountain modern or contemporary stuff. They wanted the old West. The West full of rough edges and wily characters. The West of Val Kilmer’s world in “Tombstone,” where Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday have shootouts with vigilantes at the OK Corral. The West of legends and black-and-white films. A historic West. “I grew up in the ‘60s and it was the Western genre that I grew up watching on TV, and my brother and I both wanted to have a place out West that was Western looking,” he said. “So I told [our architect] that I wanted it to look like 1875.”
Their new residence — located in the Yellowstone Club — is a home with strong ties to both history and nature. Designed by Matt Faure, of Faure Halvorsen Architects in Bozeman, the home uses natural materials such as standing-dead timbers and Montana sandstone to bring the outdoors inside, and a 40-foot tower provides clear views of Lone Mountain, the ski hill and other surrounding ranges. The owners discovered the Yellowstone Club while spring skiing in Big Sky in 2003. “ There were 48 inches of snow and if you didn’t get out before 10 o’clock, all the powder on the big runs would be gone,” the owner recalled. “And I kept looking across the valley at the Yellowstone Club and I thought, there’s no one skiing over there, how do I get over there?” He was pleased to discover the elite residential community with a private ski resort and a stunning mountain golf course. Returning that summer, he toured the course with its designer, Tom Weiskopf, also the golf legend with 25 PGA and international victories.
A conversation about how the skiing topped the golfing lead him to purchase property that summer. The Minneapolis, Minnesota, couple exchanged that lot for one with better views in the fall, and began the process of building their home in 2008, hiring Louie Loucks of Complete Project Resource to manage the project. “Louie was such an important part of the whole deal for us. Construction is a language that none of us understand except people in construction — it’s like medicine. There’re terms and phrases that they acknowledge like shorthand. And Louie could explain it clearly to me,” he said. “And he was incredibly well organized.” Teton Heritage Builders constructed the home, starting with the guesthouse so the couple could stay there when visiting over the next two years until the home was complete. Now, the guesthouse, or “love shack” as it’s affectionately called, is connected to the main house by a porte cochère.
Project Manager: John A. Venner, Lead Project Manager, Owner
Architect: Faure Halvorsen Architects
Photographer: Karl Neumann Photography
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