Henry Means has a saying that perfectly describes his philosophy of home design: "One man's pallet," he says, "is another man's palace."

Funny, huh? And in his case, it's dead-on accurate, judging by the home that he, his wife Susan, and their daughter, Ivy, occupy in Old Mammoth.

When Means, 42, bought the structure in 1995, it wasn't much more than a typical, down-at-the-heels summer cabin that had gone through at least two expansions. But now it's something of a wonder, redesigned and remodeled largely using scrap that Means, an 18-year-employee at Mammoth Mountain, brought down off the hill.

"[The house] was all kind of worn out. It had been here for a while," he said.

By collecting scrap wood from shipping pallets, iron and steel from the Mountain's scrap heap, plus whatever else he could scavenge around town, Means has built a truly unique, only-in-Mammoth home for his family.

"This," he said of the house, "is the history of Mammoth Mountain."

The distinctive and stylish siding on the home was handcrafted from the wooden pine crates in which the Mountain's Doppelmeyer chairlifts and gondolas were shipped.

"I was looking at siding, and it would have cost thousands of dollars for us to do it," he said. "We'd just started doing the Doppelmeyer chairlifts -- this was when we first started redoing Chair 1. The grips came in these 6X6 boxes. I'm not sure where the wood came from, but it's knotless, beautiful wood. So I started breaking the boxes apart and I got it home. It took me a few years to get enough to finally finish, but I just started working and doing the house all the way around. And it ended up not costing anything -- just a lot of labor."

Outside, the Means' original rock-and-mortar chimney is further bolstered by concrete, along with steel recycled from the Mountain's old gondola towers. The main entry's metalwork was fashioned from scrap from The Timbers project, across town.

The sliding doors on the front of the house came from the Mountain, too. Originally, they were slider doors. Means merely took the frames off them and put them where he wanted them.

"Whenever I needed wood for studs, and things like that, or whatever other kind of thing I needed to do for the house, I just started collecting whatever I could."

Inside, the sheetrock on the walls was all reclaimed from various projects. In the backyard, Means built a tree house for his daughter, with facades left over from the old Gravity Games.

"I went up in the middle of a blizzard to get all that wood," he said. "It was a full-on, three-foot snowstorm, and we were trying to get that stuff out because it was getting buried. I've been using that for studs and whatever I needed for years."

Means, who this year has gone into metalwork full time and has been working in many of the new structures in town, has a relatively simple philosophy of home design.

"If anything, I like to pick something up and keep it going," he said. "I like new, but I've always liked to restore and remodel things. The people who are local tend to remodel and fix things, but a lot of other people want that ‘new' dimension."