While extremely spotty wifi is preventing me from posting the New Year's post I had in mind, enjoy this renovated barn wood beauty until I stop soaking up the sun while zushing down the slopes.
Miami starchitect Chad Oppenheim created a fairly modest 3,500 sq. foot home, considered modest by Aspen standards, for him and his family nestled in the Rockies. He was just a kid from Jersey who fell in love with Aspen on a ski trip with his parents (just like me). Unlike me, when it came time to build his dream home, he chose to renovate a 30 year old ski chalet rather than build anew. With 300 year old recycled barn wood, reclaimed materials, a copper roof, and locally quarried stone, Chad chose to take the sustainable path with a wabi-sabi aesthetic and with great respect for the home's surroundings. La Muna, as it is called, refers to the Hopi word for stream. La Muna is an intimate, cozy experience that Mr. Oppenheim refers to as "romantic minimalism".
The house is decorated in taupe, gray, brown, and white so as not to compete with the natural surroundings. That is often not the case, as many designers are inspired by the colors they see out the window and bring them inside. This contradiction allows for a striking contrast, except in the winter, that is!
The Charlotte Sofas from Niba Home in Miami are slipcovered gray in the winter and white in the summer ~ love that!
Light is allowed in whenever possible and the house practically "disappears" into the mountainside.
The art is actually moss and the table is a 17th century antique from Christies.
Their master bedroom is fairly modest with the view taking center stage, as it should. The view is everything!
Mr. Oppenheim believes that if the house vanishes, you can focus on what's really important ~ the natural beauty that surrounds it. I can think of no other place that holds such natural beauty (for me and Mr. Oppenheim).
Chad's beautiful wife Ilona, the daughter of Clinique La Prairie founders, who grew up Swiss, publishes a beautiful lifestyle blog, Housewild.com or Savor the Mountains. Along with her husband they extoll the virtues of living in nature, in beauty, eating healthy, and their adventures in the wild. In addition to their newly launched website, they have a cookbook on the horizon and a series of pop up events to get out their message, "That nature can sustain us if we take the time to respect it."
photos: Robert Reck for NYT and via Pinterest
