Longing For Lodging Designers Impress Judges With Log-Home Influence

Architects are accustomed to clients arriving with scrapbooks full of pictures clipped from magazines.

But Jon Sayler has noticed another source of inspiration: videos.

“Some clients will rent movies and cue up a certain scene to show me,” says Sayler. “I’ve seen ‘The Man From Snowy River’ three or four times, and so far this year, two people have mentioned ‘Legends of the Fall.”’

It’s not actors Brad Pitt or Julia Ormond that Sayler’s customers are enamored with, but the Russian-influenced Montana lodge conjured up by Hollywood set designer Lilly Kilvert.

Of the 22 houses Sayler has designed for clients at Priest Lake in recent years, all but one have what he calls “the lodge feeling.”

And of the 35 large new homes entered in The Spokesman-Review’s 1995 Inland Northwest Home Awards contest, seven were lodges, including three Citation winners.

Contest juror Fred Albert, a Seattle-based home writer, credits fashion designer Ralph Lauren with the current incarnation of the loghome movement.

“He popularized this lodge look and lifestyle back in the ‘80s,” Albert explains. “There’s a romance to it that a lot of people respond to. It also has to do with cocooning - people turning into their home and trying to recreate what they perceive as simpler times.”

Today’s lodge movement echoes the same nostalgic chord that Spokane architect Kirtland Cutter struck a century ago when he designed the massive log building Idaho entered in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and again in 1913 with his Lewis Hotel (later renamed Lake McDonald Lodge) at Glacier National Park. In both instances, says Cutter biographer Henry Matthews, the idea was to entice Eastern visitors with a romanticized image of life in the West.

“I’m not a big fan of log homes,” concedes juror Albert. “I’m concerned about the way they consume our natural resources,” requiring more wood and providing less insulation than stick-framed structures.

And when live trees are cut for log homes, there are other disadvantages, too, as Barry and Carole Jones discovered with their new Hayden Lake retreat.

“A lot of pitch drips out of fresh logs,” says Barry, “so we have some contraptions to catch the pitch before it falls on the carpet. But that problem only lasts two or three years, we’re told.”

Then there’s log shrinkage. As the walls settle, joints must be refitted and windows recaulked. “We’re constantly checking to see if water leaked in on the carpet,” says Jones.

Decorating log homes can be another challenge. Huge posts and beams tend to overwhelm conventional furniture, and log walls make hanging pictures difficult. (“We had to put an aluminum pan behind one picture to bring the top out a bit,” Jones confides.)

Is all this, plus the added cost in materials and labor that go into a log home, worth it?

Absolutely, Jones insists. “These are just minor inconveniences. Everyone who walks in and sees the home’s wonderful lodge look says, ‘Wow!’ We have no regrets at all.”

Chelan architect and Citation award winner Kurt Wyant took a different route to achieving the lodge look. With the help of timber-framer Phil Kneisley, Wyant used recycled and remilled wood from three Seattle piers and a Chelan apple warehouse to create the structural skeleton of a lakeside vacation home, then wrapped it with energy-efficient panels of rigid foam insulation. He used fir roof decking from an Oregon fruit warehouse for the floors.

Wyant says the lodge look represents an effort to move away from today’s prefabricated products “and return to craftsmanship.”

Bill and Ronna Snyder weren’t returning to anything when they built their 4,000-square-foot lodge in rural Spokane County. “We’ve lived in log homes for 20 years,” Ronna says proudly.

This time, though, the Snyders chose conventional stick-frame construction with log details. “It was a very hard decision to leave the beauty of the (solid log) wood,” Ronna says. “But logs are hard to keep clean, and they’re constantly swelling and contracting.

“Besides,” she says, “we wanted something more energy-efficient and brighter. Wood is very dark.”

But the Snyders still insisted on a lodge ambiance, even as they made concessions to convenience.

“When you walk into a typical residence,” Ronna says, “you feel like you’re in a plastic box. The doors probably aren’t solid wood. Even the drawers aren’t solid. But when people enter a lodge-style home, they feel like they can take their shoes off, put their feet up on the coffee table and slouch one leg over the corner of the couch. All that wood makes them feel at home.”

The Snyders live in their lodge home year-round, and its architecture fits their lifestyle - Bill is an avid hunter, and Ronna sells horses.

But most of Jon Sayler’s clients are doctors, attorneys and entrepreneurs who spend their weekdays in the city, where the lodge look would be inappropriate.

“Vacation homes are a completely different deal that houses in town,” says Sayler, whose lodges earned two Citation awards in this year’s Spokesman-Review design contest. “People don’t want to go out to the lake and see drywall and plastic laminates.

“So we try to create buildings that are fun and festive and exciting and interesting, and offer the experience of being someplace completely different from town living.

“And yet,” he says, “people don’t want to really rough it, either. They want their vacation house to be absolutely comfortable, and to live the way families live today.”

Sayler achieves the rustic-but-comfortable balance with his hybrid lodges - conventional, energyefficient stick framing with lots of log details.

“I always try to avoid log-to-log connections, because that’s where the dough is,” Sayler says. “You can image trying to fit uneven round things together. It’s really expensive.”

Sayler also avoids building materials that go against the grain of lodge living - wall-to-wall carpet, drywall and other “in-town stuff.”

So how does he explain the lodge he designed that incorporates copper, black anodized aluminum and stainless steel aircraft cable? “We call that one ‘Grizzly Adams Meets the Jetsons,”’ Sayler says playfully.

Sayler describes his creations as “sort of Hollywood fantasy land notions of the traditional Western lodge,” which, he says, is similar to what Kirtland Cutter was doing 100 years ago.

“Cutter was basically doing stage-set design, where you accentuate the best elements of a style, and leave off all the rest,” says Sayler. “But all designers do that to some extent. I figure if you’re not, you’re probably creating tract homes.”

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