By Anthony Paletta
A phoenix rising from the ashes is a phrase you often read, but rarely can it have been more accurately applied than to a property nestled amid the Teton mountain range twenty minutes drive west of Jackson, Wyoming — the spectacular River House.
In 2017, Gerald Dorros, a cardiologist and longtime resident of Jackson’s neighbouring town, Wilson, had a fateful Christmas Eve. His family had gathered for the holidays when his granddaughter noticed the smell of smoke. They managed to get out of the building safely, but couldn’t prevent a fire taking hold. The house burnt to the ground, taking with it a collection of rare books and much else besides.
Undaunted, Dorros set to work on a replacement, reaching out to three architects: “The other two gave it their best shot,” he says, “but their plans were nothing compared to what Wally came up with.”
Wallace “Wally” Cunningham is an accomplished residential architect whose properties are highly sought after — his Razor House in La Jolla, San Diego, is owned by Grammy Award-winning singer songwriter Alicia Keys, while HBO’s reboot of the sci-fi classic Westworld featured another of his California properties, the Crescent House in Encinitas.
Dorros wanted the building to have as much glass as possible, to showcase its surroundings. “Sometimes we have hundreds of elk on the lawn,” he says of the 36-acre site. “The outside is the reason we’re here.” He also wanted room for all his extended family: “everybody had to be able to sit down and have dinner together.”
Cunningham explains the genesis of his design: “The site is extraordinary — it’s God’s country. The old house was too close to the tree line and didn’t give you a proper panorama. So I just walked around and picked out the site that had the best views. I didn’t want any sense of confinement. I planned the house so you were walking through the forest, walking with the elk, the deer and the moose, and the bald eagles in the trees.”
The six-bedroom property, on the market for $60mn, encompasses an existing guest house, largely consisting of two swooping steel roofs linked by a glass passageway. The main pavilion containing the master bedroom and living areas was designed to afford “the grandest view”.
The two steel roofs, which bring to mind John Lautner’s Silvertop and Garcia houses, are supported as lightly as practicable. “I wanted to use as little structure as possible,” says Cunningham. “The roofs are flying in space, they don’t touch the ground; I couldn’t put something solid between them to mess up their freedom.”
Triple-laminated glass — engineered to keep the house well insulated and to protect against occasionally intense local winds — makes up nearly all of the facades. Cunningham planned the fenestration to provide natural ventilation and cross-breezes when the windows are open.
There are other clever touches: four identical columns rise from the fireplace, two of them structural supports, two of them vents. The dining table is a large slab of black walnut that sits on iron supports from a 19th-century pool table.
Cunningham also integrated pieces from Dorros’s sculpture collection into his design. He kinked the two pavilions around a large Fletcher Benton piece and shifted an obelisk — “Leaves” by Richard Deutsch — to the other end of an existing reflecting pool so that it could be seen from the new house.
Other sculptures were placed around the grounds, where the landscaping was kept deliberately simple. Edible plants were prioritised to provide food for passing wildlife, something that delights Dorros: “I can sit in my office in a T-shirt in winter and watch the wildlife. What more could I want?” It’s proof of Cunningham’s success in his aspiration for the house to “make your soul soar”.
Photography: Krafty Photos
