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

In Larry Walker's office there is a Sierra Summer Festival poster from 1997.

It's lovely, really -- comfortable and balanced, both in color and composition. It doesn't scream. It's as if the artist wanted it to settle in a viewer's mind and get comfortable in there.

It is no surprise that the artist of that poster was Walker himself, a longtime Mammoth resident whose work now is expressed in architectural design.

It is the easel, though, working alongside with Mammoth's magnificent natural beauty, that has informed much of his work in home design, he said.

"I'm interested in making things that please the eye as much as I possibly can," he said in an interview last summer. "That's my goal with my design and that's my goal with my art. I just like things to be pleasing, easy to be around. I like things that make sense."

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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

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To that end, Mammoth's town staff and Planning Commission lean heavily on Walker's design opinions when it comes to residential home design. The reason the town needs Walker, along with other experts in the field, is because of series of regulations that stipulate home architecture in Mammoth never overwhelm the surrounding natural setting.

Not that Walker would ever want to.

"I am probably more or less a traditionalist in my design concepts," he said, noting that he is a particular devotee of Gilbert Stanley Underwood, best known for his National Park structures such as Yosemite's Ahwahnee Hotel. "I really do like to make sure that there is something unique to the mountain vernacular.

"It's got to be something that is appropriate for the mountain setting and not something that is more or less a transplant from the urban setting into the mountains."

"I think we're always going to have some kind of urban vernacular in our commercial districts, and I'm not talking for all the designers or architects and contractors in town. But to me, it's very important that there is a certain sense of appropriateness when it comes to the residential setting.

"We're kind of confined here a little bit. We don't have a lot of land around each residence. We have a tendency to put our houses very close to each other. There can be enclaves of different styles, but I really have a hard time when there's this kind of a salt-and-peppering of styles running through town."

But keeping the canvas balanced, as it were, is just one challenge.

Others are much bigger.

Walker, who works with architect Bruce Woodward in the Mammoth Design Group, took the lead in designing -- and re-designing, then re-designing again -- one of the most controversial home projects in recent history, the Mueller home in the Bluffs.

The home sits atop the Bluffs neighborhood square in the sight line of the iconic Mammoth Rock and the Sherwin Range. When the original idea of a home there was proposed, everyone, including the Planning Commission, took quick notice indeed.

"The first go-around looked a lot more severe than what you see now," he said. "We worked together as a group to soften as many edges as possible. We reduced roofline heights. We stepped the building so it more or less steps back along the contours of the ground.

"We adjusted the color palette with great attention to the surrounding colors, and tried to come up with a palette that had as little impact as possible. Really, it got down to camouflage. We tried to make things as if they grew out of the ground. That was the idea.

"We did 3-D modeling, massing models, renderings, color boards. I did at least two or three presentations to the town's staff. I mean, there was a lot of research done on that before we ever scratched the earth and it was a difficult journey to get the heads to nod, but I really think that people really appreciated, in the end, all the work that was put into it."

Among the many features of the home is "turtle glass," which prevents as little as possible inside light from escaping into the night.

The technology came out of Florida, where interior light from some beach homes threatened the life cycles of native turtles laying eggs on the beach.

"The lighting is minimal on what would be the east side of the house," Walker said, "so there's absolutely is no light, including interior, that can be seen from town."

But that was hardly the only issue.

In the minutes of one July 2005 Planning Commission meeting, the town filed a record on a Walker presentation that included modifications he'd made to the original design: a rotation of home by four degrees to help create less of a silhouette of the house and to save an existing tree cluster; the use of hip roof instead of gabled roof to achieve "stepped down" design; a change in color palette, textures and building materials; modifications of the landscape plan; changes to decks and modifications of the exterior lighting plan as well as with the interior lights.

In the end, it worked out, and Walker said he still kept in line with his own, personal aesthetic.

"Most of the people here in Mammoth are relatively sensitive to creating a structure that is somehow woven into, or has a common thread with, what we've conjured up in our minds as a 'mountain retreat,'" he said.

"Granted, that has a lot of different meanings, but what we've found is that the majority of people are very interested in indigenous materials. They like using a lot of stone and they like using a lot of timber.

"All of these things are conjured up in your mind when you're very young. There's an imprint that's left on you at an early age -- the mountains and what the structures and houses should look like.

"I actually think it goes back to the first little storybook you opened up as a child: 'And they went to the cabin in the woods,' that kind of thing. That gets down to the basics, but I think that's true."

As for Walker himself, having grown up in an artistic home, his own childhood experiences meet others' childhood conceptions on the slopes and hills of Mammoth.

And when the building phase in Mammoth is over, Walker said he's ready.

"A couple of my clients have some art in their homes," he said. "It's probably going to be the next thing I go through. I'll probably go paint. I'm not sure when I'm going to do it, though.

"Right now I'm very involved in many residential homes and I really enjoy doing this."

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