Sweet cabin, dude

CROWLEY LAKE, CALIF. —  ARRIVE at Tim Gallagher’s house, and steppingstones guide you to a front door squeezed between an epic garage on the left and the towering main wing of the home to the right. The petite middle passage -- what Tim’s architect brother, Dan, refers to as “the saddle” -- purposefully sits low, drawing the eye to the grand Sierra beyond. When that front door opens, the snow-laden mountains appear once again, through a ribbon of 8-foot-tall windows stretching along the entry hall and into the loft-like living room.

“We’re just allowed to borrow this piece of nature,” Tim says. “I wanted my house to reflect that belief.”

It’s borrowed nature, yet so much more: Conceived as a series of carefully stacked boxes sheathed in glass, cement board and corrugated metal that will rust over time, the house is a constructivist homage to the craggy peaks of Mammoth -- and a departure from the traditional wood cabins that have defined residential architecture here for so long. Perhaps more important, the design affords its owner the illusion of solitude, capturing mountain views while shielding him from neighbors -- no small feat in a resort region that continues to grow more dense.

It’s a strategy that extends even to the garage, a 710-square-foot structure large enough to house Tim’s ever-expanding collection of boarding, biking and mountaineering equipment. With a pitched roof as steep as a double-black-diamond ski run and walls made of Cembonit, a dark cement board imported from Denmark, the garage not only blocks out one set of neighbors but also becomes an abstract form, like some sort of monolithic black rock.

“We wanted to minimize its impact on the landscape by using dark materials, yet create a silhouette that would mirror that of the mountains behind,” says Dan, vice president of influential Boston firm Office dA and principal of DGG Architecture in New York.

THE brothers got away with their bold design partly because Tim, who manages the Wave Rave Snowboard Shop in Mammoth Lakes, settled on property off the mountain, about 15 minutes south in the quiet community of Crowley Lake.

“I wanted to live somewhere where people lived all year-round,” Tim says. “You do get sick of the ‘resorties.’ ” Look at the conventional and often monstrous personal lodges being built in Mammoth Lakes, however, and it’s clear the Gallaghers’ 2,400-square-foot piece of modern architecture might not have fit in anyway.

The pie-shaped lot Tim bought five years ago is at the end of a cul-de-sac. Typical of many developments in this part of the West, the subdivision was laid out like an ordinary piece of suburbia rather than a mountain retreat where views and solitude are assets worth protecting. While Tim sat on his lot, waiting for his Mammoth Lakes condo to sell before he started construction in Crowley Lake, houses arose on both sides. One was a two-story, mustard-yellow structure that extended to their mutual boundary.

So that determined one design goal: Neighbors had to be blocked out, but not in such a way as to cut down the flow of sunlight from the south, especially in winter. After 18 years living and skiing on the north side of the mountain, Tim wanted to take full advantage of the season’s short but light-filled days.

Accommodating all of these factors was a challenge. The garage was sited so its highest wall would conceal the southern neighbor yet allow sunlight to pour down into the windows of the main house. A similar scheme was used to block the view of neighbors to the north. Here Dan ran a windowless wall high above the roof line, effectively creating a light box with skylights that flood the spaces below with sunshine.

The final three-story design provides Tim with a free-flowing main living space, three bedrooms on the floor above and a small bedroom and bathroom on the lowest level, which is rented out every winter weekend to a snowboarding couple from L.A.

THE brothers make an interesting combination: the highly conceptual 42-year-old architect who frequently talks of “massing” and “solar gains,” and the plain-spoken store manager four years his junior. The new house has brought the two closer.

“In recent years I realized how important it was to keep my connection to my family in Southern California,” says Dan, who has lived on the East Coast since leaving their native Torrance for college at 17. “I thought this was one thing we could use to all understand each other a little better. It worked out better than either of us could have imagined.”

Tim’s first job at Wave Rave was in the tech department, where he became an expert on the design and repair of snowboards and boots -- experience that proved key.

“Tim likes to know how everything works,” his brother says. “We were choosing materials that were not normal, yet we were using very conventional contractors. I was on the other side of the country, so on a daily basis he took on much of the responsibility for how the house was built.”

Despite their renewed bond, satisfying both brothers’ visions rarely was easy. Though Dan liked the stacked-block silhouette of the house, he worried it might look too foreboding and run contrary to Tim’s desire for the home to sit as lightly on the land as possible. The solution: Dan extended the upper floor so it cantilevers over the living room, a move that has the added benefit of providing shade from the summer sun.

The architect also toned down the visual heft of the Cembonit, leaving a one-eighth-inch space between the panels so they resemble a floating quilt of elongated boxes. Lightness, even in these modern forms, is able to triumph.

The unconventional exterior means Tim can avoid the annual repainting some neighbors undertake, an inconvenience forced by icy winters and the brutal summer sun. Low maintenance costs are important now that he has invested about $600,000 on construction -- a figure that he says reflects a 50% premium for materials and labor in this remote locale compared with L.A.

Ask about the furnishings and Tim simply responds, “IKEA would be proud of that living room.” The orange rug, charcoal couch and TV stand all come from the Scandinavian superstore, as does the fireplace mantel -- familiar to IKEA connoisseurs as the $25 Lack shelf.

The occasional Design Within Reach purchase is mixed in along with vintage pieces, including a dining room table from PCH Modern in Redondo Beach, but nothing can compare with the stretch of windows around the ground floor. That’s where the distant mountains really make their presence felt.

“Every morning when I wake up and look out, I’m reminded how much I’m in awe of nature,” Tim says. It’s as though he’s sharing the house with the landscape that shaped his life.

Entering his first winter in the new home, Tim still seems tinged with disbelief by what he and his brother have achieved in Crowley Lake. A daringly contemporary dwelling in a primordial landscape? When pressed, he admits to only a degree of success.

“I think we pretty much succeeded in minimizing our own impact on this wonderful gift from nature,” he says, before quietly conceding: “Perhaps we even added some beauty to it.”

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