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Mammoth Monthly
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(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the Mountain Home Design 2007 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine. Download the entire magazine here)
The first time we encountered the interior designer Corrine Brown was the day we were standing in an older A-frame home near Canyon Lodge.
Her task was daunting: take a standard, old-style Mammoth dinosaur structure and bring it into the modern age.
She pulled it off in the Bewsher home without a hitch, and she's still doing it, trying to find that delicate balance between old and new, the rustic and modern, and keeping it appropriate to Mammoth.
"When you juxtapose the rustic with the contemporary, and toggle between those two, it can become a real bold statement." she said during in a conversation at her studio, The Finishing Touch.
Moving Toward Contemporary
Elliott Brainard's Tree House
The Niles Family 'Cabin'
Stretching The Meaning Of 'Green'
Larry Walker And Artistic Design
Corrine Brown And The New Technology
Robin Stater's Rugged Designs
"There are more interesting materials now, and all the new innovative products are coming into the contemporary area. When you have a client who is excited about that and is willing to incorporate that, it's really fun."
It is a balancing act with which Brown seems at ease.
Brown's own work space seems to say as much about her attitude toward interior design Mammoth as anything else.
A leather couch, emblematic of an older mountain home design aesthetic, rests on a cork floor, an example of a durable and modern "green" material of which she is particularly fond.
Brown, a Certified California Interior Designer and a professional member of the American Society of Interior Designers, has a whiz-bang computer with which she can review CAD drawings -- an acronym for computer-aided design. CAD systems allow a designer to view a design from any angle with the push of a button and to zoom in or out for close-ups and long-distance views. In addition, the computer keeps track of design dependencies so that when a designer changes one value, all other values that depend on it are automatically changed accordingly.
"I've got a lot more high-end clients, and we're using a lot more CAD and 3-D drawings to communicate with the client," she said. "It's more sophisticated, and it didn't use to be that way."
On the other hand, Brown also has a veritable library of indexed periodicals, books and other reference materials -- the antithesis of the new age, paperless office.
In another room, banks of new lighting systems are suspended from above, while swatches of materials hang from the walls, forming a mosaic of old and new, dark and bright, smooth and textured.
All of these things work toward the goal of finding the delicate balance that leads to a certain comfort level.
"What people are seeking here in Mammoth is comfort," she said. "People don't necessarily want cutting edge; they want elements they feel at home with and they feel comfortable with in an everyday kind of lifestyle. There are still the traditionalists and they want traditional, classic design. We do a lot of that.
"People with really big money can come in and do that because they might have eight homes. They can have the contemporary home somewhere else, but that's not us. In Mammoth, they want low-key, they want subtle. They don't want to be obnoxious or stand out. They want to blend in to the town, and I think that's really great. I like that.
"I would like to see cutting edge design in some places, but really, I live here, too, so I want to be comfortable, too."
Within that context, however, Brown said new materials and new technologies, in lighting, for instance, can enhance a traditionalist's aesthetic.
"Where I'm seeing the biggest change is in electrical and lighting and the fixtures we're using. We're working with suspended track systems with curves that enable us to light areas that previously you couldn't get light to.
"You can drop them down from the ceiling. So we're doing a lot with that. That's really changed in how we light places, and that's a substantial change.
"We're using a lot of Lutron systems," she said "You come in and push a button and set the scene for the whole house. It turns on a set pattern of lighting. They have another button that they can push for a party scene. They can have a nighttime scene or a daytime scene, so they can push a button, and when they leave the house they can push an 'all off' button so they don't have to walk through the house, turning off the lights.
"This kind of system is particularly handy in log homes. We did a twenty-thousand square foot log home in June Lake, and you can't put in a great big bank of switches because of the logs. This way, you can do one little cover plate and have all of your switches right there. So it really cleaned that up. For log homes that's a great solution."
As for the future of mountain home interior design, Brown said she's eager to see what will evolve.
"Students in design schools, all they're getting is green design, although most of them are trained for commercial, not residential. Even so, they are brought up on all the new products, all the new trends.
"You have a whole new generation of designers who have a completely different mindset, both in architecture and interior design."
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