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Hamilton architect Don Briggs
July 26, 2010
Dave
 
Briggs, originally from Oklahoma, has spent the last six years in Montana, doing what he loves best: working with people and their design dreams.
"My clients are so diverse," he says. "I'd really get bored if I had to design the same thing all the time."
On any given day, Briggs might be finalizing the look of a spire that's being built on a
country French home overlooking the Bitterroot Valley, or driving across the valley where
a large, expansive modern home is under construction. Briggs tends to incorporate
geometrical themes throughout his designs, as a unifying element. Sometimes, he says, geometric patterns and themes can help solve "a lot of your problems," but the challenge is to keep the design theme simple. "To create simplicity is one of the hardest things to do," he says. One of his designs included gigantic wooden horseshoes for a horse breeder in the
Southeast. The horseshoes were tied into the truss design of the home, and lent a country Kentucky feel to the home and identified its owner as a horse lover. "When I approach a project, I try to approach it with a clean slate and let the client and the project dictate the direction," Briggs says.
Briggs is working on an environmentally friendly home in the Bitterroot Valley that he hopes will become a flagship for eco-design. The home spreads over 160 acres and will include leading-edge products in the field of sustainability, including "cultured logs." These concrete fabrications look like real wood, but don't come with the environmental cost of logging them. "They're definitely different, but they're growing on me," Briggs said.
Near Darby, in a remote valley where Lost Horse Creek rushes out of the mountains,
Briggs designed a home that is inspired by nature.
With the creek rushing nearby, Briggs designed the home so that the sounds of the creek can be heard along the entire southwest wall of the home. In Montana it's not uncommon for an architect to design a home around geographical features like cliffs, lakes or mountains, but it's probably rare that an architect gets a chance to build a home around the natural feature of sound.
Walking around the property you can hear the sounds of the rushing creek. The stream also becomes an interior design element. By placing windows low and along the floor in the and allowing the windows to span from floor to ceiling, views of the creek are available on an entire side of the home. In the late afternoon, when the sun is setting over the Rocky Mountains, the creek glistens like a silver ribbon outside the huge windows of the great room.
While it's a big home, the 4,500-square foot residence captures a spirit of Montana living.
What helps to give the home its Montana lodge feel are four huge logs in the great room that provide support to
engineered, glue-laminated beams. Briggs retained the character of the logs by rough-hewing them and leaving
patches of bark on them. The home is also connected to its roots. The home was built around a decades-old cabin that had been on the property for years. Rather than tear the cabin, down the homeowners decided to build a portion of the home right around it. The homeowners hoped to save some money by keeping the original cabin on site. "Whether we saved any money it's really hard to say," Briggs said, "but the cabin is a part of
the structure, and it brings a mystique to the home."
All of the guest rooms that were built in this wing of the house around the former cabin face directly onto the creek. With the large sliding-glass doors open, the sounds of the creek waft into the rooms, bathing them in a delicate song of nature. The rooms open up to a common area on the deck, where outside fireplaces and benches encourage guests
to linger.
In a gesture of bringing the natural world into the home, small stones picked from the nearby stream were used as drawer pulls, and the fireplace rockwork came from the nearby creek also.
The homeowners contracted with the same company that built the furniture at Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone
National Park to design the hickory chairs that ring the great room dining table.
By using natural materials from the nearby land as well as from around the country, Briggs succeeded in making the home look as if it's a stately lodge from one of Montana's national parks. The wide, variable-width floorboards are cut
from Douglas fir and milled with a circular saw, a process that leaves cut marks and etchings in the wood. It makes the wood appear decades old, full of rustic charm and character.
"When I came out here I fell in love with this site,"
Briggs says. "It was so inspiring."
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