Custom and cozy blend in this ideal home for entertaining

A drop ceiling over the kitchen brings the space down to a comfortable scale

Tahoe is made for sharing. From watching a sunset with family to gathering with friends over good food and better scenery, the region attracts people who love the landscape and lifestyle—and who want the people they care about to experience it as well.

Keith Kelly, managing partner at Kelly & Stone Architects (KSA), is quite familiar with this ideal, having designed many homes in the Tahoe area where guest suites and bunks were among the priorities. 

For a home he recently designed in Lahontan, however, the owners wanted something different: to create ample room for visitors to gather, but also maintain privacy for everyone while still leaning hard into comfort.

“It’s definitely set up to entertain and have a large group there, but also to have people be able to retreat into their own cozy enclaves,” Kelly says.

The bedrooms are “segregated” into distinct spaces spread across three levels, which means everyone gets their own private retreat. Each suite features a view, so guests are able to admire a pristine meadow set against the slopes of Northstar as a backdrop. 

It is, as Kelly describes, “the vision of Tahoe that so many people have.”

A 3,000-pound granite boulder was carved into a freestanding tub for the primary bathroom

The owners are a Southern California couple who loved to head north for skiing, but had no particular plans to buy anything in the area—until the husband walked past his wife’s computer about four years ago and saw her looking at a beautiful house at Lake Tahoe.

A week later, they fell in love with the first site they visited: a sloped property bordering an ecological preserve. The 20 lots they looked at after did nothing to sway their hearts. Next came interviewing a short list of architects, with Kelly standing out.

“Keith knocked it out of the park,” the husband says.

“He had the contemporary vibe we were looking for,” the wife adds. “Everything he’s done is amazing, and he seemed really versatile, very easygoing.”

The couple laid out everything they wanted their home to include: a welcoming, friendly and warm mood; ample space for visitors; and as much of the meadow and Northstar as they could fit into view. They also wanted to showcase art throughout every room, so that’s where they started their plans. 

One of their first moves was to commission paintings for walls that didn’t even exist yet, although they knew the dimensions. Kelly would superimpose digital images over renderings of the home’s interior so they could see how the finished works would look in the physical space once it existed. Arizona-based artist Harvie Brown painted a 5-by-6-foot portrait of Chief Red Cloud for the dining area, while a 7-by-6-foot portrait of Crazy Horse hangs near the fireplace.

The homeowners have art displayed in every room, including this 13-by-15-foot pyrography mural by Eleanor Scholz

Such commissions and custom work define the aesthetic. Australian-born Robert Hagan supplied painted bison crashing through water for the game room, while actual bison supplied leather for the hand-stitched chairs by Eleanor Rigby Home in the living and game rooms.

“We really like well-made furniture,” the wife says, noting the primary bedroom and junior suite are appointed with Amish-made nightstands and dressers. “You cannot move these things. They are solid wood, and they’ll be around for probably longer than us.”

That solidity adds heft to other features of the home as well, including the showers made from huge, marble-like porcelain slabs that don’t require any major grout lines. The powder room houses an 800-pound sink and counter hand-chiseled from granite, while the primary bathroom needed reinforced floors to hold the personally selected 3,000-pound granite boulder carved into a luxurious tub. Even the windows that open the great room to the idyllic scenes beyond are giant and had to be special ordered by a friend in the glass business.

How did it all come together? The owners praise Truckee’s MD Construction as having some of the best working artisans, from masons to carpenters installing cabinetry.

Kelly says one of his major challenges for this project was taking the owners’ desire to have a somewhat contemporary approach to the house and adjusting it to make it more inviting.

A cozy game room features a masonry wall with custom built-in shelving and cabinets flanking a TV and fireplace

He describes the ultimate result—5,239 square feet sitting under flat and shed roofs—as one the more contemporary designs in Lahontan, though it boasts traditional, rich materials like stained horizontal wood siding and natural stone. There are some steel accent pieces, but the design avoided an abundance of metal panels to achieve a warmer feel.

“We worked the driveway and auto court to keep these large boulders that had moss and lichens and ancient crusts on them and leave them alone,” Kelly adds. “Same with sagebrush and wildflowers and native plants. We landscaped just the immediate disturbed areas around the house where construction activities had to take place and made sure we didn’t disturb the site beyond what was absolutely necessary to build the home.”

A fair amount of stone appears on the inside as well, along with rustic materials like knotty alder timber beams and cabinets. Walnut finishes and clean slabs tip the scales away from expected cabin elements and back toward contemporary again. Kelly says these eclectic touches provide welcoming balance in many places, such as the open great room, which features a drop ceiling over the kitchen to bring that space down to a more comfortable scale.

Bookending the space are two characteristically outsized elements. On one end sits a massive fireplace, measuring 18 feet high and 11 feet wide. The owners felt that some fireplaces in other homes appear thin (“almost like they’re pasted on the wall”), but they wanted theirs to stick out—metaphorically, visually and physically. Essentially, they wanted an anchor for the room, and they got one. The material is not a single type of stone, but a mixture of four different kinds worked into a custom blend. On the kitchen side, the backsplash is a slab of Italian quartzite from Antolini.

Visitors for meals are likely to find that backsplash to be spotless, since the owners have a butler’s pantry that serves as a second full kitchen, complete with a pizza oven. The custom-made claro walnut dining room table seats 10, and that secondary kitchen is more than equipped to handle feeding a full house.

A substantial fireplace keeps the primary bedroom warm

Kelly credits Classic Design, owned by the mother-and-daughter interior design team of Joy and Shell Akers, with the cohesive way the house shows off its diverse styles. He lists a sampling: “There are wood walls, ceilings, wall textures, really unique tiles, wallpaper, walls with knots and walls that are modern, marble walls, walnut walls, cedar ceilings—more than we typically would have done. There’s stone in secondary bathrooms and bedrooms …  

“Some of my counterparts may say it’s busy or utilized too many different materials. For the client, it’s these distinctive material choices that help define the sense of space, seclusion and comfort.” 

One of the most distinctive features in the home is a pyrography mural by Eleanor Scholz. The San Francisco artist used a special tool—like a calligraphy pen mixed with a soldering iron—to burn a wooded scene spreading 13 feet tall and 15 feet wide directly into the pine wall. She came to the property for weekends and holiday stretches over a two-month span to complete the work. 

While the smoke from that project has long cleared, guests are encouraged to kindle blazes of their own in one of two outdoor firepits: one on the deck and a larger one just a bit farther out, suitable for more than half a dozen people making s’mores at once. The owners keep a cabinet stocked with marshmallows—and keep arms open to welcome others to their slice of Tahoe paradise.

Award: Mountain Comfort

Building Design: Kelly & Stone Architects

Builder: MD Construction & Consulting Inc.

Interior Design: Classic Design

Landscape Design: NA

Square Feet: 5,239