A Little History

I began Mountain Timber Design at the turn of the century (this one) and have put together timber frame house/site compositions in some of the most scenic regions in the country. I have based my career on skills gained by working on complex projects on sometimes extreme terrain, typically at very distant locations. Living in Colorado has put me central to projects from Montana to Texas, Oregon to North Carolina. Currently doing much work in Alaska, I enjoy both the unique environments of remote locations and the interesting people I’m privileged to work with.

Fly fishing is my favorite pastime and I typically share a love for the outdoors with my clients, friends and family. With four daughters and hardly any drama, our family likes to travel, and we are fortunate that my wife, Lynn, is a flight attendant.

I have drawn and painted my whole life.

History

Raised in a Navy family, we moved often but spent my formative teen years in Southern California. From 1972 to 1976 I attended UC, San Diego studying political science and art while surfing Blacks Beach and working outside on the college landscape crew. In 1978 I took my first trip to Alaska, fishing, working on oil platforms and working in a drafting firm. In Alaska, I began a life-long love affair with… Alaska. 

Armed with my political science degree, and feeling qualified to go get an entry level job on a framing crew, I entered my construction based career. After a few years of building near the beach, tanned, strong, and pretty worry free, I decided to get serious and combine my attraction to construction with my artistic inclinations…. so off to grad school I went.

Moving to Colorado in 1980, I entered the Master of Architecture program at the University of Colorado in Denver, and undertook the journey through the design fields. After earning a Masters Degree in 1983, the next fifteen or so years found me working with big and small architecture firms, interiors firms, design/build firms, and seven years with a structural engineering firm where I developed a serious affinity for posts, beams, and structure in general.

I stepped into the timber frame world in the mid-nineties, representing a major company, designing houses, selling, and raising the frame plus panel systems. Within a few years I started Mountain Timber Design, an independent architecture firm specializing in Timber Frame Homes.

Having gathered a lot of experience on the subject, I decided to write Crystal Lantern House as a way of introducing people to my world, the world of Custom Timber Frame House Architecture.