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RENOVATIONS USUALLY AREN’T LESS EXPENSIVE THAN BUILDING NEW, AT LEAST IN JACKSON HOLE, BUT THEY’RE INCREASING IN POPULARITY AND OFFER THEIR OWN REWARDS.

These days, and for several years now, “remodel” in Jackson Hole isn’t something done to a bathroom, or a kitchen. “Five years ago, remodel projects were smaller, but today’s remodels can be 5,000-square-feet or more,” says architect Shawn Ankeny, who founded her eponymous firm in 2005. “Clients want their entire homes redone.”

It’s not just the scope of renovations that is growing, but also the number of them. “When we started, we were doing about 20 percent remodels,” says Rush Jenkins, creative director and co-owner, with his partner and COO Klaus Baer, of WRJ Design, a firm that was founded in 2003 in Manhattan and moved to Jackson in 2010. “Now about 40 percent of our projects are remodels. This is a trend I do not see slowing down in Jackson Hole.”

You can fix a house, but you can’t make land appear.
— Alison Price West, architect

A main factor driving both the increase in remodels and the size of them is that “there is just so little vacant land available now,” says Rob DesLauriers, a real estate broker in the valley since 2003 (and an associate broker with Sotheby’s since 2011). Architect Alison Price of Price West Studio says, “You can fix a house, but you can’t make land appear.” Like WRJ, Price has seen an increase in the number of renovations—versus new builds—her firm does; she estimates 85 percent of her current projects are remodels.

Land has always been scarce in Jackson Hole—because of the national parks and forests that make this valley the special place it is, only 3 percent of the land in Teton County is privately owned. “And a lot of that is over [Teton Pass] in Teton Valley, in Alta,” DesLauriers says. (Alta is in Teton County, but not in Jackson Hole.) “There’s no doubt the inventory of property for sale is scarcer now than it has been,” Jenkins says. DesLauriers says that there are 10 or fewer vacant lots in Teton Village and “all but one or two are owned by the adjacent homeowner to protect their views and privacy.” These homeowners have little desire to sell their extra land. “They’ll either sell their house first and then sell the land, or sell the two together. You have to buy the house so that you can get the vacant land,” DesLauriers says.

It can be difficult to look past the brown, log, or heavy timber, but a great team—an architect, interior designer, and builder—can create a totally new feeling in a log house.
— Jesse Roy, Couloir Construction

Teton Village isn’t alone in its scarcity of lots. “There are very few land subdivision opportunities now, and, in the older subdivisions, the best lots were taken early and built on in the late 80s, 90s, or early 2000s,” DesLauriers says. But these homes built 20 to 30 years ago, while they do sit on the best properties in their neighborhoods, have an aesthetic and flow—a materials palette heavy on log and wood and a compartmentalized layout—that doesn’t resonate with families today. “Tastes have changed in the past five years, never mind the past 20 or 30,” Jenkins says.

Homeowners want these prime locations, but “they want their homes to be open, brighter, and airier than the log homes popular 20 years ago are,” West says. “A majority of people are here to bring the outside in. They want to feel connected to nature and have their views. Many older homes were not designed to live this way.” But they can be made to. Jesse Roy, owner of Couloir Construction, which does new building and renovations, says it can be difficult to “look past the brown, log, or heavy timber, but a great team—an architect, interior designer, and builder—can create a totally new feeling in a log house.” But this does require a big commitment and investment.

“Renovations should not be done piecemeal, because once you refresh one room, the rest look outdated,” Jenkins says. “I always say, let’s dive in and do it all. It may seem overwhelming at first, but clients are always thrilled in the end.” While not all designers agree with him (see sidebar), they—along with builders and architects—do agree that surprises are inevitable in every remodel. “In any renovation, no matter how many existing drawings you have, there will be surprises,” West says. Builder Roy says, “We can speculate what’s behind a wall, or even have drawings telling us what is supposed to be behind a wall, but until you’re in it, you don’t really know what’s really there.” West has found unexpected water pipes and opened up a wall to find a duct that wasn’t shown on drawings. “Some houses have a tremendous amount of surprises, and some have less,” she says. “But they all have some.”

But not all surprises are bad: Jenkins and Baer remodeled their own East Jackson home; following their own advice, they “dove in and did it all.” When the vinyl siding was ripped off the exterior, a historic log cabin was revealed. “We had no idea there was this
fabulous log cabin inside our house,” Jenkins says. “We had to rethink our plan, and it was expensive to keep the cabin, but the amount of charm and warmth and history of that cabin—I wouldn’t change a single thing in our decision to renovate and save the cabin and
to rebuild the house around it. It wasn’t easy, but it was very, very well worth it.”

Jenkins makes a point: Interior designer Jacque Jenkins-Stireman (no relation to WRJ’s Rush Jenkins) says, “There is something about the coziness of log that you can’t get from another material.” She says her favorite projects apply a modern aesthetic to an outdated log home and result in “a beautiful, open, light, and bright home that still has the cozy properties of log. To me, that’s the best of both worlds.” Ankeny says many of her renovation projects include an aspect that is new, like a guest home or an addition to the existing home. “I love projects that involve reconciling new construction with existing,” she says. “It’s a fun and creative challenge to figure out how we are going to marry the two. Maybe you end up making the existing house look more like the new, or maybe you do the opposite. Either way, the end result is a building that is more interesting than its individual parts.” Jenkins-Stireman says, “Renovations can be a challenge, but they also present possibilities that sometimes just aren’t achievable with new construction.”

THE ONLY “STYLE” WARD | BLAKE DESIGNED SPACES HAVE IN COMMON ARE THEIR RESPONSIVENESS TO THEIR SURROUNDINGS.

People try to categorize the awardwinning work of Jackson-based Ward | Blake Architects but find it impossible. “That’s the idea,” says Tom Ward, who, with Mitch Blake, founded the firm in 1996. Ward | Blake has designed private residences at the Amangani Resort, homes at the base of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, a LEED Gold certified childhood learning center, and even homes made from dirt (using the firm’s patented EarthWall construction technique).

“We don’t have a ‘style’ because we respond to the site, the climate, the client, and to the views, some of which we’ll want to protect and others that we’ll want to enhance,” Blake says. “We hope the biophilic nature of our work resonates with people viewing our portfolio. Even if two clients want the exact same program, every project we design is completely site-specific.”

While Ward | Blake projects do not bear a stamp of the firm’s “look,” they do have similarities. Every Ward | Blake project is sensitive to its environment, successfully integrated with its surroundings, tactile, modern, and artfully crafted. For this approach, the firm was named the 2013 Firm of the Year by the six-state American Institute of Architects’ Western Mountain Region and has won numerous International Design Awards (IDA), which were created to recognize, celebrate, and promote legendary design visionaries and smart and sustainable multidisciplinary designs. The firm’s IDAs include Architect of the Year, which it won for one of the four EarthWall homes it has designed and built. “It’s difficult to persuade someone to build their dream house out of dirt, but the end result is such a unique, tactile building with a personality of its own,” says Ward.

We don’t have a ‘style’ because we respond to the site, the climate, the client, and to the views, some of which we’ll want to protect and others that we’ll want to enhance.
— Mitch Blake, architect

Not surprisingly, more important to the firm than a huge project budget is having clients who are interested in doing interesting things. “The design process is iterative and improved by clients who engage,” Blake says. Ward recalls the firm’s founding vision: to be provocative in thought, flexible in nature, and disciplined in execution.

ONE OF JACKSON’S MOST EXCITING BOUTIQUE ARCHITECTURE FIRMS HAS ADDED INTERIOR DESIGN TO ITS OFFERINGS.

Offering interior design services was always something I was interested in doing,” says Chris Jaubert, who founded A43 Architecture in 2016 after more than a decade of working as an architect at larger valley firms. “It makes building a new home, or remodeling an existing one, more efficient and can save clients money. And it can result in a more cohesive finished product.” In 2020, Jaubert brought interior designer Reed Duggan on board. Duggan had been on the interior
design team at CLB Architects for five years. “If an architect and interior designer are working together, the interiors become so much more profound,” Duggan says. “Chris’s work informs mine and mine informs his. He draws something and I refine it, and then he refines it again, and that goes back and forth throughout the duration of the project. You can really drive home a design concept when there is this continual collaboration.”

We work together to achieve results in architecture and an interior design aesthetic that are synchronized and that make clients happy.
— Chris Jaubert, architect

Since joining A43, Duggan has been involved in every project the firm has tackled, from new builds to kitchen remodels to full remodels; he’s even involved in projects where clients opted for an outside interior designer. “We love collaborating with others; Reed isn’t at A43 for us to shut out other designers,” Jaubert says. “And when a client does use another designer, they still get the benefit of Reed being part of A43. Reed is a great translator between other designers and the builder and the clients. He makes our work better and clients’ lives easier.”

This is especially the case in bigger projects, which Jaubert sees A43 doing more and more of. “Bigger projects come with more challenges, and also with more license for both myself and Reed to explore creative solutions,” Jaubert says. “Creating things out of thin air—to start with nothing and end with something beautiful and functional— that is the reason we do what we do. We work together to achieve results in architecture and an interior design aesthetic that are synchronized and that make clients happy.”

INTERIOR DESIGN THAT CAPTURES THE ROMANCE OF THE WEST.

In the vast world of Western design, Andrea Lawrence Wood stands out for her ability to transform artifacts, textiles, and other materials into interiors that deliver a grounded sense of place. For more than three decades, the Jackson-based designer has individualized high-end mountain homes and properties that refuse to be easily categorized. “Each project is tailor made for that specific client,” Wood says. “Why build such a beautiful house in such a beautiful place and not have it be individual to you?”

Some clients arrive with a distinctive vision they want to achieve, while others rely on Wood’s extensive design knowledge to hone their aesthetic. All benefit from her enduring relationships with suppliers, architects, builders, and artists, including herself; Wood designs and commissions custom furniture. It’s this trove of relationships, vision, experience, and artistry that make Wood a coveted mountain home designer.

A large part of my job is understanding what the West means to each client and designing to reflect that connection with the place.
— Andrea Wood, interior designer

A classically trained pianist, Wood first encountered interior design as a young newlywed living on a ranch in Sheridan, Wyoming. Her remodeling efforts transformed one of the ranch houses into an office, another into a guest house. She found the work so rewarding that she studied interior architecture and then opened her own firm. One of her first clients was the then-president of Colorado’s Keystone Resort. The log home Wood worked on with him landed in the pages of design magazines, and her career was launched.

Although her clients hail from near and far, all share a love of the West. Often, Wood’s suggestions stretch her clients’ imagination and result in stunning, inimitable interiors. She’s used serape blankets as window treatments and transformed recycled timber into custom dining room tables. Finely honed Sandstone counters resemble the smooth leather of a saddle, and beaded Native American strips might trim decorative textiles. And, this year, she’s offering a new collection of interiors and furnishings known as the Western Collected Interior. “It will feature the romance of the West in new and exciting ways,” says Wood. “A large part of my job is understanding what the West means to each client and designing to reflect that connection with the place.”