(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the Mountain Home Design 2007 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine. Download the entire magazine here)

It's one thing to live among Old Mammoth's trees, but quite another to live in one.

That is the idea behind one of the town's more innovative homes, designed and built by longtime Mammoth architect Elliott Brainard.

"What this is," he said, gazing toward the exterior of the home, "is a metaphor for a pine tree. It's an organic shape; you look at it through the trees and the bottom is round. As you look at the exterior, you're looking through branches."

---

Mammoth Home And Design Special
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

---

However, these branches are neither trees nor, in fact, wood. They are steel beams jutting from above a stone base, with the stones laid in a vertical pattern to resemble the bark of the surrounding Jeffrey pines. Between the steel beams are huge glass panels -- air, as it were -- and the building, eighty percent glass, is topped by a junction point of steel pieces, the crown of the tree.

The platform of the one-bedroom home is a series of joined triangles, while back outside, there is not a single surface that can be painted. Surrounded by granite boulders and the natural landscape, Brainard, fifty-two, built the house so that it requires no outside maintenance at all.

The affable architect, sitting on one of the boulders outside the structure during a conversation about Mammoth architecture and design, smiled when asked if he'd heard any reaction about the home.

"So far," he said, "everybody who's seen it really likes it, even though it's very different. Everybody seems to follow the metaphor."

Brainard has been around Mammoth for twenty three years -- long enough to have seen the various phases of Mammoth styles and designs.

Finally, the concepts of home design have come around to where Brainard is at his most comfortable: organic sensibility that has its roots with the late John Lautner and the Taliesin Fellows, a group of apprentices to Frank Lloyd Wright.

"When I say 'organic,' it has to do with the way you develop space; the relation to each room and the overall relationship to nature," he said.

"This is organic, is what this is."

Once inside the house, the light changes with each step upwards. Downstairs, in the trunk, as it were, the home is dark, sheltered and cozy. As one ascends the stairs, the home opens to the light gradually until, on the main platform, grand vistas of Mammoth Mountain and the Sherwins come into view.

Everything is a natural color, so much so that sometimes it's hard to tell if you're on the inside looking out or the other way around.

It is impressive by any standard, made more so by the fact that it is Mammoth, which is situated in a difficult seismic zone (zone 4) and a heavy snowload zone.

The engineering on the house was by Bill Jenkins, who had to wrestle with the round base and the overhanging platform.

"He said it was the most complicated building he'd done in over twenty years," Brainard said.

"We have this weird combination of Seismic Zone 4 and snow. That doesn't happen anywhere else in the world. It's unique.

"Even in Tahoe, you might have heavier snow ground weights, but they're not in a Seismic Zone 3. We're the only ones I'm aware of building in Seismic Zone 4.

Zone 4 locations are located nearest to active earthquake faults and pose greater hazards than Zone 3, according to the state Seismic Safety Commission.

Aside of from this particular home, Brainard was the principal architect for Stonegate, the project along Minaret Road.

Here, too, he said he brings an organic sense into the buildings.

"The idea of Stonegate came from when I was living at Snowcreek Phase V. I used to wonder how I would do it, if I could start over.

"In the unit I was in, it was on the back of the project but it wasn't on the open space side, so I had to look across a lot in front of me to see a view. Really, you wouldn't want to look across the road and look across another building.

Stonegate happened because we wanted a project that was more of a niche design; not an Intrawest design, with more privacy, with separated buildings instead of common wall. It's a good example of the higher-end condo world than anything that's happened here before."

Even with Stonegate, though, Brainard's crowning achievement, so to speak, is in his single-family tree house.

"You get used to what you do; I'm not looking for shock value or anything like that. It's just an expression in a lot of ways. This is more vision-oriented.

"You don't always get to do something really different, so this is what this is. It's definitely what this is about."

View image View image View image View image