Log House
- Location Livingston, Montana
- Design 1997
- Construction Manager Ed LeTourneau
- Structural Engineer G + S Structural Engineers
- Civil Consultant Kerin and Associates
- Design Principal Thomas L Shafer AIA
- Project Architect David Strandberg
- Project Team Scott Crowe AIA, Ben Gauslin, Benjamin Zachwieja
Located forty miles north of Yellowstone Park in Livingston, Montana, the Log House questions and redefines the traditional notions of log construction. Hours of research, discussions, and visits to log suppliers went into understanding the material qualities of logs. A unique construction strategy was invented to minimize the logs’ tendency to shrink in their long direction. The logs were used as a skin, not as structure; a pole barn formed an inner skeleton to which hand-chinked logs were mechanically bolted.
The cabin is divided by a two-story living area with floor-to-ceiling glass that looks south to panoramas of a valley and mountains beyond. The eastern end contains a guest suite above a two-car garage, and to the west, a master suite is located above a kitchen with eat-in dining. A massive, two-story chimney anchors the house structurally and provides an acoustic and visual barrier to subdivide the house’s open plan.
When circulating along the interior of the north elevation (shown above), a hip high ribbon window frames a view of native grasses. Once seated this view is reoriented toward the horizon. The ends of the house are completely glazed, affording spectacular views of the mountain ranges and of wildlife that venture by to bed down in the nearby tall grasses.
Materials were selected for their compatibility with the surrounding environs such as hand chinked dead lodge pole pine logs, pewter colored standing seam metal roofing, indigenous rocks and stones, fir and pine trim and decking, cleft slates and quartzite, as well as forged black iron and milled steel.