Luxury Residential Aspen Residence in Aspen, Colorado by Forum Phi Architects

This contemporary mountain residence offers attractive modern elements including copper barrel roofs and a sleek, chef-inspired kitchen. The stunning views are maximized from all angles, yet privacy is key thanks to the home’s strategic design. The entry offers a secluded courtyard feel and many South facing windows help to significantly reduce energy usage in the winter. The expansive kitchen, living room, dining and family areas are designed as a completely open floor plan which gives the large house the vibrancy and cozy comfort of a smaller residence. The house offers all the luxury amenities a resident could dream of including a state of the art media room, and a master bedroom of around 2000 sq ft with his and hers closets, extravagant guest bedrooms and bathrooms galore, a modern kitchen, lounge area, den, offices.

East Aspen Luxury Residences

• Architects: Forum Phi Architects www.forumphi.com
• Location: Aspen, Colorado
• Details: 7 Bedrooms, 7 Full Bath, 7 Half Bath
• Area: 9140 sq ft

Master bedroom

“We are engaged in an ecological revolution every bit as profound as the preceding Industrial Revolution.”—SIM VAN DER RYN, PIONEER IN EOLOGICAL DESIGN

Mainstream society has traditionally looked askance at funky houses built with recycled materials: wood salvaged from barns, corrugated roofing from abandoned lean-tos, stained-glass windows from the defunct country church. Today, however, we’re
paying homage to what the counterculture knew decades ago: Off-thegrid design isn’t for misanthropes living among bears; it’s au courant and downright responsible.

Architects are taking the bohemian credo and fusing it into home design for the savvy, carbon-neutral-conscious buyer, and Basalt-based architects Christopher May and Steev Wilson of Forum Phi, which specializes in LEED and green building technologies, are examples of the trend. Their latest dream project is a 4,800-square-foot (plus garage) luxury spec home in Brush Creek, and it’s 100 percent off the grid.

“Our intention is to produce far more electricity in a year than we could ever use,” Wilson says. “We’ll put it back on the grid so that someone else can use it. It’s more responsible.” And it still meets the demands of those who insist on high-end amenities. “We’ve given so much thought to every detail,” May adds. “But the idea is that it’s repeatable.It’s buildable. It’s not expensive. This can be done.”

Living Room

The Look
Organic Modern. Two floors. The exterior is sheathed in a mix of stone and Ceraclad, a new product from Japan that is nearly 50 percent postconsumer recycled as well as 100 percent recyclable, fire-rated, and extremely durable. “Typically we prefer projects that are driven by the environment,” Wilson says.

“By looking at your solar angles and prevailing winds, you see what the topography is doing and you let that inform the way the house is going to be. The design is born of the site.”

Kitchen

The Features

• “A rain-screen glass wall spaced with a foot of air followed by another piece of glass creates a mini greenhouse effect that will exhaust onto the roof, which is metal, so it’ll conduct very well,” Wilson explains. “The racks that hold the solar will stop snow slide and the metal roof will both get rid of and melt the snow, using this greenhouse-heated air.”
• An open atrium along the back lower-level wall allows morning sun to heat the bedrooms as well as the east-facing glass, which sends heat up through the vertical atriums to the upper portion of the house.
• Radiant-heat concrete floors topped with remilled Idaho barn wood.
• TwoFlush toilets, LED lighting, light shelves, Xeriscaping, and maximum recycling and on-site reuse to slash long-term costs.
• A 370-square-foot greenhouse, complete with raised planter beds to keep plants warm. A vertical water-holding system rather than plaster on
• the back greenhouse wall will keep both plants and the building toasty.
• Colorado water rights make it illegal to capture water for nonpotable usage. But Forum Phi has a solution. “You can slow it down,” Wilson explains. “All the water we will put to a dry well will go through a long perforated pipe. We’ll use that as an irrigation method.”
• Since the house is in a high-wildfire area, they’ll pass on a sedum rooftop in favor of solar panels that are “sized based on the amount needed to achieve carbon neutrality. We’re looking at between 15 and 20 kilowatts, depending upon the efficiency of the panel we buy,” says Wilson.
• May and Wilson plan to produce enough electricity with the solar panels to have plug-in stations in the garage, which is prefitted for electric cars.

Tags: Aspen, Colorado

Category: House

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