Mountain House

Introduction

As an interior designer, I have always been fascinated not only with how people live but also where they choose to live and why. This curiosity brought me to surfing locales around the world in the making of my first book Surf Shack and into the most interesting and expansive home libraries in my second book, Bibliostyle. As someone who lives in the city and loves to travel with my family, I couldn’t help being interested in homes perched in the highest altitudes.

How do we define a mountain house? You might imagine a quaint wooden cottage surrounded by pines, maybe with a stone chimney and billowing smoke, but what I found while working alongside the photographer Chris Mottalini and writer Michael Snyder was just how many ways there are to live with and design for the mountains. A mountain house may not even represent escape to some homeowners—several of the homes we found are primary residences. Some are even located in major world cities. 

People have occupied the mountains for just about as long as humans have been around. For nearly 50,000 years, we have had ancestors sheltering under rocks more than 10,000 feet above sea level, and many of our most ancient gods have resided in the mountains. Religious seekers, guerrilla warriors, and political dissidents alike have all treated mountains as retreats from the world, building stupas and monasteries into impossible rockfaces, or establishing alternative societies in the folds of hills where lowland powers can’t reach. It’s not a coincidence that some of the most biologically, culturally, and linguistically diverse places on earth are mountainous. Mountains seem intimidating, even scary, to those of us who were born and raised at sea level. They remind us of how small we really are, which makes them practically divine.

For the most part the houses included in this book were built, in one way or another, in that ancient tradition of retreat. There are now eight billion people in the world and more than half of us live in cities, which has turned wilderness from something to marvel at or fear into something that many of us yearn for. Some of these houses bring nature close through design choices, such as using organic materials like stone and wood sourced near the homes. Other homeowners quite literally brought the outside in by erecting porous walls or, in some cases, eliminating doors and windows altogether, leaving blank apertures that open to the surrounding landscape. Some of the houses were built with the understanding—radical to city dwellers, logical to everyone else—that everything goes back into the earth. These houses will one day be part of the mountains themselves.

In choosing these homes, we weren’t looking for the highest altitudes or the most remote corners of the world, though some are high up and more than a few were hard to get to. Instead, we thought about how architecture and interiors can embody and reflect their surrounding environments. Maybe even more so, we wanted to explore how those environments can, through time, reshape the lives of the people who live within them. Over the course of a year, we traveled to twelve countries on five continents. We met artists and architects, chefs and designers, writers and movie producers. No two people experience their homes in quite the same way, and no two houses are exactly alike. Some are radical, others traditional, some historic and others barely complete. A few are solitary, but most of them were built with family and community in mind. All of them are creative and adaptive and beautiful.

During the pandemic, I found myself, like so many others, yearning for a little space in nature, a little more exterior to explore. More recently—and more resolutely—I’ve wanted to distance myself from constant accessibility, one of the many downsides to our technologydriven world. These are romantic ideas and still not much easier to manifest in the country than in the city; we had internet access even in the farthest reaches of Patagonia and cell service on a mountaintop in the Austrian Tyrol. But there is something about the sheer fact of distance and the incredible beauty of these landscapes that can put in perspective the endless beeping and buzzing of our devices. In a world this big, nothing is quite so urgent.