Wine & Wildlife

JACKSON HOLE ARCHITECT ERIC LOGAN DIDN’T NEED TO SEE THE NUMBER THIS PARTICULAR FAX - A ROUGH SKETCH OF A KIND OF WINE CELLAR - HAD COME FROM. His only client who would have thought to make a wine cellar a wine silo was Ray Thurston.

Thurston and Logan, AIA and a principal with Carney Architects, had already worked on several structures together – a 7,600-square-foot lodge-style main house and, on the same 150-acre property north of the town of Jackson, a slightly more contemporary outlying shop/office/entertainment area Thurston calls his “más macho” building – by the time Thurston faxed the sketch. “But this idea was totally different from anything we had done together before,” Logan says. It was also different from anything Logan had done with any other client. “I had done wine rooms and cellars before, but nothing as sculptural as Ray was proposing here.”

The structure, finished in 2006, received the 2007 Custom Home Magazine Grand Award for an Accessory Building and the Residential Architect Design Award of Merit from the Western Mountain Region Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Thurston, who, with his family, splits time between Jackson Hole and Arizona’s Paradise Valley, wasn’t necessarily thinking about his wine silo as sculpture when he first came up with the idea. Mainly it was practical — their land sits in the Snake River floodplain so going into the ground wasn’t an option — with a nod to an aesthetic that would mesh with the ranch-inspired buildings already on the property. “I had been playing around with a bunch of designs when I saw a farm that had a silo sitting next to a barn,” Thurston says. “I thought that would go well with the land and house, spent a weekend playing around with a rough silo-based design and faxed what I came up with to Eric.”