Scherry Harrah, second wife of famed casino pioneer Bill Harrah, had the longest marital tenure of Harrah’s six wives (21 years) and according to her 2000 obituary in the LA Times, she had considerable involvement in the finishing and outfitting of Harrah’s Reno and Tahoe...
Cliff May. While not exactly a household name, architecture aficionados widely credit him with creating the ranch house style. Horizontally oriented featuring open layouts, plentiful glass and a blurring of indoors and out, his fusion of Spanish revival style and modernism were tailor-made for Southern...
Ten years ago, with blueprints drawn and the first two buildings recently completed, a Carmel-based homeowner was getting ready to begin construction on his Martis Camp estate. “We had it all designed back in 2008,” he says. “We were getting ready to break ground on the...
The first homes at Sugar Bowl Resort were built in 1939, the same year that downhill ski operations began. As a snow-bound village—where homes are only accessible via snowcat during the winter—the Sugar Bowl Village offers a rare experience in today’s ski communities, giving Sugar...
“You are high, dude. That’s the dumbest thing you could buy in this whole store.” Those were the words of Steve Woerz—aka “Steezy Steve”—spoken to his good friend Ben Paciotti in a Washington surf shop around 2011. The “thing” was a powsurfer, essentially a wide, binding-less...
Simplicity isn’t necessarily easy. From the road, the home on Martis Camp’s Villandry Drive seems unassuming: clean lines with a modest material palette of steel, stone, glass and wood. Yet, creating a vision of simplicity is more complex than it seems. It requires perfectly proportioned...
With the evolution of mountain home design grew the freedom to meld various styles, resulting in truly customized creations where multiple elements blend harmoniously under one roof. Such is the case with a rustic second home with modern twists in Truckee’s Lahontan community....
When a Bay Area family decided to move full-time to Tahoe, they wanted a home that reflected their mountain modern lifestyle. They purchased a half-acre lot in Truckee’s Schaffer’s Mill development and enlisted the help of Truckee’s In House Builders and residential design firm Mountain...
Certain slivers of geography attract residents who transform that land into lore. Ranking among those larger-than-life landscapes like Big Sur and Laurel Canyon is a boulder-studded section of Crystal Bay shoreline that for years served as the Rat Pack’s playground and a retreat for luminaries...
Sitting on a blue sofa beneath an Andrew Bolam painting of a wolverine, Joann Ellero, a self-described “scrappy kid of immigrant parents from Detroit,” announced that she never, ever envisioned the dream house she was sitting in before the design process started....