At some point in 1863, Mark Twain caught a horrible cold. Recounted in his essay How to Cure A Cold, Twain describes his travels from Virginia City, Nevada, to Lake Bigler (Tahoe) to Steamboat Hot Springs (between Reno and Carson City) and finally to San...
Snow is falling from the sky in thick curtains of white, when Mike Basich yanks the pull cord on his snowmobile and the engine growls to life. Daylight is fading, but his snowmobile’s headlight casts a warm cone of brilliant yellow out in front of him,...
When an aging Incline Village vacation home was ready for a long overdue update, its Bay Area owners set out to give the generations-old extended family gathering spot a makeover that both preserved its cherished past and created a refreshed retreat firmly focused on the...
In 2014, San Francisco architect Steve Geiszler sat down with a Bay Area client he’d collaborated with on two previous projects in the city to discuss the client’s Martis Camp lot. “We were working this out together,” Geiszler says. “We went through the programming [how many...
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...
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....