Shelter Magazine winter 2013-14

shelter home & living in the

western san juans

Iron Man Tagine Dreams A Painted Lady Going Energy Neutral A Sanctuary for Elk and Spirit

winter 2013-14 Published by The Watch

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t 14,246 feet, Telluride skiers say they get a good glimpse of heaven...

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£ÊU Lot 13, West Hastings Mesa End-of-the-road 50 acres, located on a ridgeline with 300º views, backs to meadows & an aspen forest. $625,000

ÎÊU 22031 Highway 145, Fall Creek The San Miguel River flows steps from this well-kept 3-bed home with manicured lawns and gardens. $599,000

xÊU Lot 201A Benchmark Drive, Mountain Village This sunny, almost half-acre parcel with views of the San Sophias & ski area has easy access to skiing. $895,000

ÓÊU 105 Wapiti, Ski Ranches This 3-bed home plus 3-bed income unit is set on 2.2 acres of aspen with a peaceful trout pond. $895,000

{ÊU Mountain Lodge, Mountain Village 3-bed penthouse, big views. $549,000 2-bed gardenlevel by creek. $399,000 lodge amenities & ski access.

ÈÊU Camel’s Garden 301, Telluride A rare opportunity to own right at the gondola, this 2-bed has tasteful finishes and beautiful east views. $949,000

Polly Leach-Lychee, Broker/Owner | plychee@tellurideproperties.com | 970.369.5333, Direct 237 South Oak Street | Telluride, Colorado 81435 I tellurideproperties.com

This may be as close as you get...

Why not stay a while?

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£ÊU 207 East Gregory Avenue, Telluride Overlooking Bear Creek, the town & ski area, this 5,000 sqft aspened lot affords 1 or 2 homesites. $1,500,000

ÎÊU 300 Old Butterfly Road, Matterhorn On a 35-acre knoll with 270º views & high-end finishes, this 6,000 sqft retreat provides limitless recreation. $2,995,000

ÓÊU Dalwhinnie, Ridgway A stately 7,730 sqft home spread among 60+ acres along the Uncompahgre River. Stable & water rights. $3,995,000

{ÊU 329 North Fir Street, Telluride A 6-bed, Victorian home of the highest craftsmanship on a corner lot. Close to Main Street. $2,990,000

Polly Leach-Lychee, Broker/Owner | plychee@tellurideproperties.com | 970.369.5333, Direct 237 South Oak Street | Telluride, Colorado 81435 I tellurideproperties.com

Helpful Resources for Those Looking for Information About Energy Efficient Green Homes

www.Ecobroker.com The premier green destination for real estate professionals, their associates, and their clients.

www.ColoradoGreenBuildingGuild.org The website for a nonprofit trade organization representing a wide range of green building leaders.

www.EcoactionPartners.org Telluride’s homegrown nonprofit, funded by the towns of Telluride and Mountain Village and San Miguel County, whose mission “is to inspire, initiate and support collaborative community actions that enhance resilient economic, environmental and social systems.

www.EnergyStar.gov A U.S. EPA program that helps businesses and individuals save money and protect our climate through superior energy efficiency.

www.BuildingGreen.com An online ecostore.

This information is brought to you by George Harvey of The Harvey Team.

George is a certified EcoBroker, which means he has completed EcoBroker course work in energy efficiency, green building, and smart growth. “ Put Our Real Estate Networks to Work for You”

THE

George R. Harvey, Jr. Owner / Broker

TEAM

970-729-0111

www.TheHarveyTeam.net George@TheHarveyTeam.net

shelter

FEATURES

PRODUCTS

Publisher Seth Cagin

Love Objects

Editor Marta Tarbell

Brighten up your winter with an eye to beauty and sustainability.

Copy Editors Leslie Vreeland, Marta Tarbell Creative Director Barbara Kondracki Designer Nate Moore Photo Editor Brett Schreckengost

By Marta Tarbell

A Shrine to Pop Art

By Jessica Newens

At once small and tall, this compact riverside home designed

by Connie Giles and built by Josh Kent was the perfect home for one family’s collection of pop art.

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Advertising Sales Tammy Kulpah, Zackery Slaughter Circulation Scott Nuechterlein On the Cover

ARTIST/ARTISAN Iron Man

By Leslie Vreeland

Telluride Forge’s Joseph Paczosa works with metal, fire and finesse.

Contributors Samuel Adams, Martinique Davis, Gus Jarvis, Jessica Newens, Marta Tarbell, Leslie Vreeland, Samantha Wright Advertising Director Heather Zeilman

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Sanctuary

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By Leslie Vreeland

Joy Billings built her home on a ranch that’s sanctuary to a herd of elk, adding a labyrinth for herself that she walked at least once a day for spiritual sustenance.

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FOOD & BEVERAGE Sweet Tagine Dreams

By Gus Jarvis

It was a white elephant; now it’s the go-to dinner pot for home-cooked meals in the Jarvis household.

43 I’ll Follow the Sun

By Martinique Davis

The house Bob and Jenny Delves built to make the most of the sun’s travels across their Mountain Village lot became energy-neutral, a few years later.

The Kullerstrand House, a classic Victorian Queen Ann-style “Painted Lady” at 510 5th Avenue in Ouray, lovingly restored over a 12-year-period by Jim and Susie Opdahl, who bought the house in 1997.

(Photo by Brett Schreckengost) Shelter is published twice a year by Watch Newspapers, a publication of The Slope, LLC, P.O. Box 2042, Telluride, Colorado 81435.

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited.

To advertise in Shelter, call 970.728.4496.

For editorial inquiries, please email editor@watchnewspapers.com.

Offices 125 W. Pacific Ave., Suite B2, Telluride, Colorado 171 N. Cora St., Ridgway, Colorado 14 S. Uncompahgre Ave., Montrose, Colorado

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PUBLIC BUILDING The Friends Are AllWright

By Samantha Wright

Thanks to Friends of the Wright Opera House, the 125-year-old structure just keeps getting better.

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Rehabbing a ‘Painted Lady’

By Samantha Wright

Jim and Susie Opdahl’s long labor of love brought a Victorian gem vibrantly back to life more than a century after it was built in Ouray.

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GREENHOUSE Tips From a (CANNABIS) Grower

By Samuel Adams

Indoor growing is all about light, water, soil, temperature – and bat guano.

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Sefra Maples

interior design + consulting

luxury interior design

970.708.7855 seframaplesdesign.com

editor’s letter

grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” book series, their homespun dramain-the-details of living amidst peril a welcome contrast to my own sterile suburban landscape.

I think about that now, sitting in front of the (gas) fire, enjoying the aroma of soup stock simmering on the stove from roasted lamb and chicken bones and vegetable trimmings from last night’s slow-cooked dinner in a North African-inspired tagine I bought from Le Creuset as a Christmas present for Seth.

I handed it over a few weeks ahead of time, obsessed by Gus Jarvis’ descriptions of his sweet-and-savory concoctions in “Sweet Tagine Dreams” (page 43). With our early-winter gray skies and plunging temperatures, I anticipate tagine dinners until root vegetables give way to spring salads, although I do hope to master the indoor greens-growing process using some of the gardening tips from Alpine Wellness grower Nolan Murphy (page 62).

Being carbon-neutral these days requires planning, as we learn from Martinique Davis’ visit (page 46) to the effectively 100 percent solarenergy-fueled home of Bob and Jenny Delves. The trick? Its design with an eye to the path of the sun as it moves across their five-acre lot, and then adhering to the precept that “form follows function.”

Telluride Forge’s Joseph Paczosa is all about function. “You have to use it,” he tells Watch arts columnist Leslie Vreeland (page 36) quite sternly, after she has pledged to cherish the “tool fit-for-a-warrior-princess” she so thrillingly created at his downvalley studio. Vreeland sees another piece of the form-follows-function spectrum at Joy Billings’ sanctuary (complete with a labyrinth for contemplative walking) abutting Bureau of Land Management land, near Ridgway, when a regularly visiting elk herd makes a regal appearance (page 22).

A 12-year labor of love rekindled the picture-perfect Queen Anne ‘Painted Lady’ on our cover that had fallen into disrepair by the time it was bought by Jim and Susie Opdahl (page 29) in 1997. The Opdahls were key, as well, to the restoration of the town’s historic Wright Opera House, which enters its interior restoration phase this winter (page 54).

For comic relief, we turn to the beautiful vertical gray home designed by Telluride architect Connie Giles alongside the San Miguel river. The word “comic” applies to the painting of Minnie Mouse in the stairwell, but there’s so much more pop art flooding this house in a river valley, like a hallucinatory eddy catching bright neon colors.

And that brings me full circle to the Wilder books, with their emphasis on the American ingenuity that abounds in The Old Farmer’s Almanac, a newsprint book that’s been a U.S. best seller, its current creators say, since its 1792 inception. The 2014 edition is available at Between the Covers, in Telluride, right now, thanks to Old Farmer’s founder and current author, Robert B. Thomas, who, intriguingly, has a Facebook page all his own.

So there you have it – a theme, to this winter’s Shelter magazine, a back-to-the-future, same-as-it-ever-was custodianship where accountability takes precedence, in a land where leftovers are sustenance, once again, and dreaming is what we do when we’ve earned the right to let our minds roam.

And in dreams, to coin a phrase, begin responsibilities

Marta Tarbell

contributors SAMUEL Adams left his job as a staffer on the United States Senate Committee on Finance for Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) to scan lift tickets and ski the entirety of the Telluride Ski Resort in 2012. Even though he immersed himself in alpine skiing, he’s retained his love for following American politics and current affairs; he is the Telluride reporter for The Watch. PAGE 62

Brett Schreckengost’s work for Shelter has taken him into countless living spaces, where he is always on the lookout for inspiring ideas to take home.

During the summer months, Watch Editor Gus Jarvis and his wife Torie are always on the lookout for their next outdoor adventure, be it hiking, camping or rafting. During the frigid winter months, the two keep their sense of adventure alive in their Montrose kitchen, bringing in flavors from around the world. Thanks to a dusty cone-shaped kitchen ornament, they discovered, and have fallen in love with, the at-once sweet, spicy and savory Moroccan cuisine. PAGE 43

Elk appeared in both of Leslie Vreeland’s stories for this issue, and “I noticed my subjects’ connection to these animals said a lot about the way they saw the world.”

Vreeland thinks elk are regal to look at and delicious to eat, but is not sure she could bring herself to hunt them. She understands there is a contradiction in this. She lives in Ridgway. PAGES 22, 36

Martinique Davis has lived in Mountain Village much of her life, and has seen the town evolve from a sparsely populated outlier of Telluride to the wellestablished community of locals and second homeowners it is today. “It was refreshing to explore the possibilities homeowners have to be more green,” she says, of Bob and Jenny Delves’ energy-neutral Mountain Village home. PAGE 46

Jessica Newens has noticed architect Connie Giles’ river house and its intriguing concrete wall for years on her commute between Telluride and Norwood, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. She always longed to get a peek inside, to take in how it climbs vertically and opens out onto the river. Her invitation came via a friend, its owner since 2006, who has filled the home with a fantastic pop art collection. As it turns out, the house lived up to Jessica’s every expectation and more, from its openness and light to its clean and modern furnishings. She now has some serious house envy. PAGE 15

Samantha Tisdel Wright writes and raises two redheaded children with her husband in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, dividing her time between Silverton and Ouray.

She enjoys seeking out stories that capture the human dramas that have unfolded in such beautiful old historic buildings as the Wright Opera House and the Kullerstrand House in Ouray. She thinks it might be nice to live in a house with a pointy corner tower.

PAGES 54, 29

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products

love objects TREE-TRASH TREASURE

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“Throw away nothing” is the motto at Triassic Industries, the Moab-based tree service-cumfurniture-making enterprise now employing ten percent of the town’s workforce. Their tamarisk bowls are a case in point: A dangerously invasive plant in the southwestern U.S., the lightweight wood from the deciduous tamarisk (or salt-cedar) shrub is prized in its native northern Africa and southwestern Europe climes. In the Triassic workshop, burled tamarisk becomes useable art.

Triassic transforms other tree-cutting detritus into everything from one-of-a-kind spoons to tables, cutting boards, children’s toys and jewelry; their one-of-a-kind products are available at Mélange Telluride Artist Boutique and Studio, on Telluride’s main street, and in Moab, at the main street Triassic Industry Furniture Store. For more information, visit triassicstone.com.

WATER FEATURE The handcrafted MAST is a natural humidifier. Its design resembles a sailboat, with a hull-like base into which water is poured, topped by a thin-sliced mast that diffuses water into the air. Hull and mast are made from Japanese cypress – hinoki – which boasts natural antimicrobial and anti-rot components. Spare masts can be ordered; MASTs are made to order in Japan. Visit ohashiryoki.com/ products/mass/mast.html for information.

SHEEP-SHAPE Breathable, sustainable, responsive to changes in temperature, sheep’s wool is perhaps the most effective all-weather protection known to man. Minnesota’s Faribault Mill, in business since 1865, began making blankets for the U.S. military more than a century ago. This permanently mothproofed, machine washable and dryable double-cloth Foot Soldier blanket, designed to accommodate the widely varying temperatures of cadet sleeping quarters, is at once warm, heavy and breathable. Available at Customs House. For more information, visit customshouseonline.com.

GOODNIGHT, MOON “She said ‘goodnight’ to the moon and fell asleep in her nest beneath flowers and berries.” This is how Ulla Darni describes the Moonscape design in her vast nature-inspired lighting collection of reverse-painted chandeliers, table lamps, wall sconces and nightlights. Darni’s light fixtures – in an array of romantic florals, whimsical abstracts, lush tropical abstracts and landscapes, all painted on free-blown glass, are “the Tiffany of tomorrow,” says Ed Malakoff, owner of the Pairpont Lamp Museum. Available at Lustre Gallery, on So. Pine St., in Telluride.

‘NORTH AMERICA’S MOST POPULAR REFERENCE BOOK’ The Old Farmer’s Almanac, first published in September, 1792, bills itself as “North America’s most popular reference book” and oldest periodical. “A calendar of the heavens,” it contains everything from “recipes for those who live in the kitchen and forecasts for those who don’t like the question of weather left up in the air,” and takes its motto from founder Robert B. Thomas, to always “strive to be useful, with a pleasant degree of humor.” Check out the 2014 edition for everything from tips on fishing, planting and piecrusts to reports of new social movements (“Dogs are taking swimming classes, while owners watch through underwater viewing windows”). Best ad of the year? “Vinegar Can Be Used for What?” on page 272. Endlessly entertaining and useful. Available at Telluride’s Between the Covers, on main street.

BASKET CASE Colorful market baskets of hand-woven sustainable savanna grass – wild-harvested, it grows abundantly with minimal water or nutrients – come in a rainbow of natural-dye colors from the Alaffia Basket Cooperative in West Africa.

The cooperative employs and empowers indigenous West African women, offering fair wages, safe working conditions and healthcare.

Its employees support their families and their communities while maintaining their handeddown skills, knowledge and traditions. Each basket is unique; light, strong and supple, the large-size market baskets hold up to 50 pounds of produce. Available at Natural Grocers, in Montrose. Visit alaffia.com for information about more products from this cooperative.

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# HOMES SOLD TELLURIDE MTN. VILLAGE $5.5 MILLION OR ABOVE SINCE 2008

P E R F O R M A N C E . S E R V I C E . R E S U LT S.

LEE ROUFA, 4:1 MARKET DOMINATION SINCE 2008 A

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L E E D E F T E L L U R I D E R E A L T O R S

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Lee has outsold any broker in the Telluride Mtn. Village luxury home market. Of the 14 homes sold; Lee has sold 4 of them.

Generations of Experi

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Why *realtor B has sold the same house twice.

HISTORY

AQ U I S I T I O N S • S A L E S • E S TAT E M A N A G E M E N T • VAC AT I O N R E N TA L S In 1980, Ed, Lee and the family moved to Telluride, our home and refuge.

It comes down to servicing one client at a time. The father and son team at San Joaquin Realty LLC. are proven trusted and seasoned professionals.

For over 25 years they have played off one another, strategized and doubled up on resources resulting in a long-standing boutique powerhouse firm.

L E E R O U FA

E D R O U FA

MANAGING BROKER | OWNER lee@s telluride.com 970.728.6240 OFFICE 970.729.0526 MOBILE w w w

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RREEAALLTT Y Y,, LL L C

307 EAST COLORADO

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B R O K E R A S S O C I AT E ed@edroufa.com 970.728.6240 OFFICE 970.729.1625 MOBILE u i d e

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feature

Life Art a n d

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B y J e ss i ca N e w e n s

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P h o t o s b y B r e t t sc h r e ck e n g o s t

Downvalley from Telluride, tucked comfortably into a narrow lot between Highway 145 and the San Miguel River, is a unique home that perfectly suits its occupants. Recognized by many for its tall stature and distinct concrete wall, the house is intriguing, easily catching your eye as you zoom past on your way to or from Telluride. A longer peek reveals minimalist landscaping, aside from several

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Taking full advantage of their proximity to the San Miguel River, the owners extended the downstairs deck to run the full length of the house.

(Right) The main floor of the home is one open space from kitchen to living room. In a display case is Niki de Saint Phalle’s 1965 mixed media assemblage “Don Quixote.”

wise old cottonwood trees lined up in a row alongside the house and a bit of lawn with a scattering of outdoor gear. Once inside, the house envelops you with openness, light and warmth. And the distraction of the highway is immediately replaced by awe, as the river unfolds in front of you.

The home was designed by Telluride architect Connie Giles, and built in 1994, by Kent Building Company. The original owners, who hailed from California, wanted a place to retire. After purchasing the lot, they hired Giles, who herself had relocated from California a mere four years earlier.

“The lot is actually quite large, but most of it lies on the south side of the river,” explains

Giles. After compliance with the required setbacks, minus the roof overhangs, the buildable area dictated “a house that is only 19 feet wide – really skinny,” she says. “We came up with the simplest footprint,” resulting in house that is taller than it is wide, with an east-west orientation that offers the most solar exposure. Locating the well and the leach field and then determining what portion of the site was left for the house was “such a puzzle,” she continues, but “the challenges were fun – like figuring out how to block out the highway noise, and helping the owners not feel like they were right on the road.”

Giles tackled the noise issue by designing a massive concrete wall facing the highway to the north. Inside the home, bathrooms, mechanical rooms, closets and stairs are set against the same side of the house, further buffering the occupants from traffic noise.

Giles incorporated distinctive structural brackets to hold up the home’s eaves, which playfully angle up and out from the roofline. The building’s shape and materials – corrugated metal roof, cedar siding, even the concrete – represent a collective nod toward the simple barns and mining structures that abound regionally.

Giles likes to document precedence in her work, she says. “The outside of these buildings needs to belong to this place. The inside can be whatever.”

Inviting the River The inside of this home is hardly “whatever.” Its stature is prominent, with living areas organized around a three-story central space that receives daylight from above, and is crossed by stairs and catwalks at the upper levels. As the stairs wind their way vertically through the home, white risers and fir treads make them appear to be floating. Clear glass panels act as banisters, maintaining openness and casting light on trips from bedroom to bathroom to office.

The downstairs living space is dominated by the river, with a series of seven-foot-tall >>>

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windows and glass doors lining the entire south wall and continuing around both sides. An attached deck cantilevers out toward the river, extending living space outside. Similarly, the upstairs bedrooms are oriented toward the river with large windows, skylights and a cantilevered balcony.

A House of Art While Giles’ river house was designed to be a private retirement retreat, its destiny became something quite different when, in 2006, a family of four traded the rainbows and sunsets of Hastings Mesa for a vertical

life next to the river.

Living with toddler girls on a high-altitude mesa was a challenge, to say the least, so finding a home that was more convenient to town became a priority, says their mother, leaning comfortably against her butcher-block kitchen counter. “On the mesa, everything we did was about getting home and leaving home,” she explains.

Yet an even stronger priority was finding an appropriate home for her family’s art collection, which was then sitting in storage.

“I wanted a house for the art, first and foremost,” she says. “It had to have enough white walls to display the art.” The day she and her

husband walked into Giles’ river house, “we immediately knew this was it,” she says.

I hear a faint clicking sound coming from upstairs. On the landing is something reminiscent of a traffic light, with arrows of green, blue and orange that flick on and off. “I turn that on only when special people come over,” she deadpans. The piece, “Telaunt,” by Tom Lloyd, joins a substantial collection of 60s and 70s pop art that fills almost every wall and corner of the home.

“This is the art I grew up with,” she explains. “My sister has the other half of the collection,” which the two inherited when their mother died in 2004. The sisters >>>

grew up on the 10th floor of an apartment building in downtown Chicago and often accompanied their parents to gallery openings, including several in New York City.

“There are no names anyone would recognize,” she explains. “They just bought what they liked for not much money. They were super hip beyond their years – beyond that time.”

She points out a box sitting in a plexiglass case outside a bedroom. “Check out

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The master bedroom (above) is spacious and light with built-in maple furniture and skylights.

(Clockwise from left, previous pages), With white risers, fir treads and glass banisters, the stairs appear to float as they travel vertically through the home. A collection of 60s-70s pop art fills the house, including Gerald Laing’s “Yellow Bikini” (1965), Stanley Edwards’ “There’s a Monster Behind My Painting” (1965), and Allen D’Arcangelo’s “Blue With Road” (1967). Kids’ artwork covers the kitchen refrigerator.

this magical box of weirdness,” she says, removing a real stuffed bird off what looks like a treasure box covered with straight pins and colored yarn. She opens “box #47,” by Lucas Samuels, to reveal more patterns of pins and yarn and other fascinating knick-knacks.

As we move through the upper two levels, touring the home’s bedrooms and bathrooms, she points to other one-of-akind art pieces mixed in among simple, built-in bookcases, bedframes, bureaus and desks. “Everything was already built in and remains the same, right down to the hardware,” she says. Even the bathrooms are unassuming and timeless, with basic white

tile, cabinetry and plumbing fixtures.

The home’s clean and simple lines are typical of Giles’ design, which she describes as “modern by Telluride standards,” with a limited number of materials, and “not fussy.” The house also reflects the architect’s interest in exposed structural systems that are functional rather than faked in. This is especially obvious on the third floor, where exposed wood rafters add dimension to steeply sloped tongue-and-groove ceilings.

The main floor is one long room, from kitchen to living room, providing an open family environment, complete with kids’ artwork and family photographs. The kitchen still has its original appliances and maple cabinetry, and Douglas fir flooring runs throughout.

Between the dining and living spaces is another plexiglass display case, this one featuring Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Don Quixote,” a mixed media assemblage of a figure on a horse that’s entirely covered in little plastic toys – baby doll heads, skulls, critters, toy solders.

The homeowner points out a bookcase alongside the stairs, noting that it’s one of the few things she and her husband added to the house. They also extended the downstairs deck so it runs the full length of the house, allowing better flow to and from the yard. In warmer months, the kids get a kick out of watching their dad occasionally kayak home, eddying out right next to the house. “They think it’s the coolest thing ever,” says their mom. Sometimes they toss out apples, water and beer to boaters passing by.

Interestingly, during certain times of the year, living in a river canyon can actually be a bit of a nuisance. “It’s so loud in the spring and summer – so roaring that I have to wear earplugs at night,” she says. “And by winter solstice, we lose the sun at noon.”

But common sightings of otters, beavers, bears and bald eagles are magical. And watching the ever-changing river transform from season to season is beautiful.

For this family, finding such a unique and satisfying home right next to the river has been pure serendipity.

© 2013 Mountain Khakis. All rights reserved.

Y O U R L I F E C O U L D U S E A F E W L E S S S I D E WA L K S .

A U T H O R I Z E D M K R E TA I L E R S : B AC KCO U N T RY E X PE R I E N C E DURANGO 970.247.5830 P I N E N E E D L E M O U N TA I N E E R I N G DURANGO 970.247.8730 JAGGED EDGE TELLURIDE 970.728.9307 S A N J UA N S P O R T S CREEDE 719.658.2359

LIFE UNTUCKED

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feature

Pilgr im ’ s 22

Joy Billings’ home and refuge, for herself, and for the resident wildlife below Log Hill off County Road 24.

Pr

gress

With intention and devotion, Joy Billings found her path

By Leslie Vreeland

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P h o t o s b y B r e t t S c h r e ck e n g o s t

“Then it seemed like falling into a labyrinth; we thought we were at the finish, but our way bent round and we found ourselves as it were back at the beginning, and just as far from that which we were seeking at first.”

– Karl Kerenyi, quoting Socrates from Plato’s dialogue in The Euthydemus “They’re elegant and strong – completely different from us.” Joy Billings is speaking of elk. A herd of several dozen moves down from Log Hill every winter to graze in a pasture outside her front door. Billings has been watching the animals ever since she constructed her home, an elegant, low-lying adobe tucked discreetly into a sagebrushcovered hill off County Road 24. “They’re safe here,” she says of

the resident wildlife. “I’ve decided to let this be their sanctuary.”

With no less determination, Billings decided this place would be her sanctuary, too. A respect for nature, beauty and the mysteries of spirit are at the core of who she is, and those essentials guide the choices she makes, beginning with the decision to build a home on this land.

“This property,” she said, “is the reason I came to Ridgway.”

The land, and the home she put on it, is as much a refuge for Billings as it is to the elk.

She’s originally from San Diego, and was widowed at a young age. The grief was so intense, “I thought >>>

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24 “Every large home needs a nesting space,” Billings says of her den, above. At right, top photo, her painting of Mount Sneffels, and below, a “shrine” in her bedroom with artistic works and figurines representing her world travels to places including Nepal and Tibet.

if I stayed in Southern California, I would die,” she said. “I sold everything I owned and moved to Colorado.”

Billings was staying on the Front Range when her real-estate attorney, “a weekend Harley guy” who took motorcycle rides all over the state, gave her a “red-lined” map with suggestions of places she might like to live. Billings had made a list of everything she hoped for. You could say she was setting an intention. “I think that’s how life is,” she explained. “We’re co-creators, and you need to consciously participate” in what you want, and where you see your life going. “I think everyone has a role in the outcome.

They just don’t realize it.” On Billings’ list for what she wanted in her own life at that point: A creek, water rights, 100+ acres, hot springs, panoramic vistas, and most importantly, peace. “I needed to be in nature,” she said. “I needed a calmer, slower pace of life,

without the insanity you get in cities.”

One of the places on her map was Ridgway, where Billings found all of what she hoped for. It was a ranch, with prime views of the Cimarrons to the east, and the Sneffels Range to the south. “I even got the hot springs!” she said, just down the road at Orvis.

Unfortunately, the ranch wasn’t for sale.

So in 1994, Billings bought a piece of property close by, and built a house overlooking the property she really wanted. Then she waited. “I stared down at it every day,” she said. The “co-creation” process was apparently successful. After five years, “It seemed like the right time” to re-approach the rancher about selling, and he did. Billings built her dream house.

The passive solar adobe, designed by her brother-in-law, Gary Saunders, has been dug into a hillside for warmth in winter and to be as low profile and unobtrusive as pos-

sible. Her home’s design “seemed to fit with the landscape,” Billings said. In keeping with her desire to “blend in” and use as use as few extra resources as possible, the insulation is made of blown-in, recycled newspaper. Billings’ home is every bit as much a refuge indoors as it is for the ungulates outside. In her bedroom, there is a wall of statues and artistic works from China – both Tibetan and Buddhist – as well as paintings by her nephew, Lucas Sanders. Billings is an artist herself, and her own paintings – a fiery portrait of Red Mountain at sunset, the icy pinnacle of Mount Sneffels against a milky winter sky – are also on display. She keeps a wellcurated collection of rocks she has found, or purchased, in her travels abroad. “I am fascinated by the elements,” she said.

Billings’ home is a refuge for the arts and artists in other ways, as well. Her living room is large enough to hold a concert

25 Billings’ living and dining room, above. “My home is my sanctuary,” she said. “I want every room in it to have meaning.” The house was designed by her brother-in-law, Gary Saunders, in consult with Billings.

in, and so she does every summer, allowing the space to be used by the chamber-music group Trio Solisti, which performs in this region with support from the Ouray County Performing Arts Guild.

Her home’s greatest refuge of all may be the labyrinth she has built outside.

A labyrinth is a single, circular, winding path that leads to the center, often used for spiritual contemplation. Though they are often thought of as maze-like, labyrinths are “unicursal,” meaning there is one way in and one way out, though often by a lengthy, complex route. They are ancient in form; evidence of labyrinths has been found as far back as 1200 BCE, in ancient Greece, and also in Europe, India, North Africa and the American Southwest. There are two types.

The Cretan form recalls the Greek myth of the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull hidden in the center of the labyrinth and slain by

Theseus, who used a piece of twine given to him by Ariadne to find his way back out. The medieval form is named for what is probably the most well known labyrinth of all: the path

Billings’ h me is a refuge for the arts and artists

placed on the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France in the early 13th century. Billings has never been to Chartres, but the choice to put a labyrinth on her property seems uniquely fitting, considering she calls the place her

sanctuary, and the famous labyrinths of medieval Europe – Chartres, Amiens, Reims – are located in sanctuaries. The labyrinths in the great cathedrals of France might have been pilgrimage sites. It was too dangerous to travel to the Middle East when the cathedrals were built, so pilgrims may have made their journeys on the labyrinths.

Sally Swearingen, a consultant at the Parish Resource Center in Valley Stream, N.Y., explained the appeal of the labyrinth’s shape in The New York Times. “The labyrinth is different from a maze,” she said. “In a maze, you have choices along the way where you can get lost. But in [a] labyrinth, no matter what you do, you’re going to end up in the center, you’re going to turn around and follow the path back, and you’re always going to be safe. It’s a journey back to yourself and you’re never going to get lost.”

Billings’ labyrinth is made of brick, and >>>

26 The labyrinth, upper left, and, below left, Billings’ kitchen, which overlooks the Cimarron Range. The piano is used each summer by chamber music group Trio Solisti, who hold concerts in Billings’ living room. At right, elk return each winter to graze just outside Billings’ front window. “I feel like I live in a painting,” she said. “I really do.”

is in the Cretan style. In the summer, water ripples past it, over large rocks she gathered from a construction site down the road. The circular path a labyrinth takes “is infinite,” she says, and reminds her of the infinite possibilities of creation.

“I call myself a recovering Type A,” she laughs. “When you change your mind, your world changes. Whenever my mind would get going with crazy thoughts, I would come out here and breathe, and walk, and it would calm me down. I wanted something physical to remind me: you don’t have to participate in all the craziness and all the drama. You can just walk and stay with you. People think you either have to sit down and meditate to help yourself calm down, or get up and move around. But the two can go together.”

Billings used to walk the labyrinth almost every day, in any season. “You’d find me out here at any time,” she said, “even in the

snow.” Though she still traces its circular pathway, she doesn’t need to walk it quite as regularly. “I still love looking at the labyrinth, and walking it,” she says, “but it doesn’t have the same pull it did.”

When she moved to Ridgway, and built the labyrinth, Billings wanted peace. Could it be her work in the labyrinth is done, and now she can move on? Whatever the reason, she recently put her house on the market. She is back to a new beginning and, as Socrates might have put it in Plato’s dialogue, “just as far from what [she was] seeking at first.”

“I really want to simplify,” she said. “I don’t know what that means, or where I’m going.

In the past, I’ve always had plans, so this is a big shift for me.” But, she added, “My whole thing is beauty, in whatever form it takes.”

When the house sells, “It will be the time to move. The most important thing to me now is to have a relationship with the Divine.”

The Circular Circuit Because labyrinths are closely associated with spiritual contemplation, they are often located in churches, as well as public parks, gardens, retreat centers, even hospitals, to help ease stress and speed up rehabilitation. They can be found all over. A website called the Worldwide Labyrinth Locator at www.labyrinthlocator.com, for example, turned up 94 in Colorado. A group of volunteers who call themselves the Labyrinth Community Network spearheaded the creation of the Toronto Public Labyrinth. In our modern, chaotic culture “the chance to step into an oasis of calm” that a labyrinth affords is rare, the group notes on its website. However it is used, “The labyrinth remains a metaphor for the individual’s journey through life.”

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GALLERY 204 West Colorado Avenue • 728.5566

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H ouse History W ith

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By Samantha Wright p h o t o b y b r e t t sc h r e ck e n g o s t

Renovating a Victorian ‘Painted Lady’ in Ouray

he first time Jim and Susie Opdahl saw the century-old house they were destined to spend a dozen years renovating, it was not love at first sight. In fact, their gut instinct was to walk away.

Close to retirement and intrigued with the idea of “redoing” a Victorian house in a mountain town, they had traveled to Ouray and hired a real estate broker to show them around. The real estate broker >>>

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Upon entering the house (above, top to bottom), a staircase ascends to the second floor; the study was remodeled in Craftsman style, to provide a more masculine counterpart to the Victorian details throughout the rest of the house; an elaborate fireplace in the front hall provides heat to the vestibule and upstairs. Facing page, Susie Opdahl surveyed the Kullerstrand House in 1998, before any renovation work had begun. (Photos by Jim Opdahl)

brought them to the Kullerstrand House, an iconic Queen Anne-style “painted lady” on the market, named for Gustav Kullerstrand, the turn-of-the-century expert architect, builder and cabinetmaker in Ouray who built the house with his friend and business partner, Walter A. Reynolds, in 1898, for the Reynolds family.

Perched at the top of Vinegar Hill, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Fifth Street in Ouray, the house resembles something out of the Addams Family, with its pointy tower, steeply pitched asymmetrical roof and gabled dormers, stained glass windows and spindly gingerbread ornamentation.

Although the home was lovingly occupied by a succession of local families for almost 100 years, time took its toll.

“There were holes in the walls, and with a broom handle to the ceiling, you could push the plaster back up about four inches,” Jim recalled. He and Susie agreed that it was “just too much,” and went back to their busy lives in Oregon.

It was 1997. They were both still working fulltime, although Jim’s practice in oral and maxillofacial surgery was for sale, and Susie planned to retire soon from her work as a developmental therapist treating multi-handicapped babies and toddlers. They were taken with Ouray, but still uncertain how the next chapter of their lives would unfold.

A few months later their broker, John Lesnefsky, called to say another couple had made an offer on the Kullerstrand House. A little relieved, Jim and Susie told each other that Ouray, and the house, were just not meant to be.

But soon Lesnefsky called again. Jim took the call; they were in the middle of a dinner party at their house in Oregon.

Lesnefsky launched into an explanation that the financing for the deal with the other couple had fallen through. “Would you like to know what price was accepted?” he asked.

Jim hissed for Susie to come join him.

They huddled around the phone, in full view of their guests. It was a spontaneous decision. “OK, make the same offer.”

And they went back to their party.

Later that night, as they lay in bed, Susie elbowed Jim. “Is there a bathroom on the first floor?” she wondered. Suddenly, they were flooded with worry and doubt. They assured themselves that if they ended up with a house they didn’t want, they could always put it back on the market.

A WONDERFUL START The die was cast when Jim’s practice sold. Newly retired, at loose ends as Susie continued to work, he drove alone to Ouray in the early spring of 1998 to visit their “new” house, pulling a U-Haul trailer full of carpentry supplies.

“The previous owners had said they were going to leave a bed upstairs,” he recalled. It turned out to be just a mattress on the floor. Meanwhile, the propane company had red-tagged the furnace as unsafe.

“So I’m here an hour and I’m looking up new furnaces,” Jim said.

The next morning, he stepped outside and decided to do something about the grass, which had grown two feet tall all around the house. In the old garage, he found a scythe, and headed out into the yard to give the lawn a haircut.

It was a warm day, so he took off his shirt, and was busy whacking away the weeds, when he noticed an elderly woman practically stomping down the street right at him.

“She came right up to me and she said, ‘Hello, my name is Martha Grace Robison. I was born and raised and married in this house, and I’m going to tell you about it,’” Jim recalled. “I said ‘Yes Ma’am; let me put my shirt on.’”

As Robison shared memories of her childhood home with Jim, she began to cry. Her family had lived there longer than anyone – 44 years – but she and her sister had sold the house after their mother passed away.

“She called it her house,” Jim recalled.

“She remembered Christmases here and sleeping out on the porch with her sister in the summer. She loved the house. She had wanted to purchase it back for herself, but was not in a position to do so.”

As he settled into working on the house that summer, it seemed like everyone was interested. “I would see people slowly walk by on the other side of the street, mostly older people, kind of looking to see what I was doing,” he recalled. “Sometimes I would wave or say hi and I would get this short little nod. Then, as work progressed, those same people would start walking a little closer.”

Eventually, Jim was allowing about an hour every day, just to visit. “People would

stop. Some would have an old story about the house – or the people who used to live there. They truly felt this was the community’s house, and they wanted to make sure I was gonna do OK on it.”

It wasn’t long before he attracted local media attention, as well.

One of his first tasks was tearing down the old garage next to the house to make way for a new one. The next week, columnist Peggy Cox, who lived just up the hill, made note of it in her weekly dispatch, the Ouray Nuggets.

Two days later, the building inspector

paid Jim a visit. It was clear that he had read the paper.

“He said, ‘I see you tore the garage down,’ and I said ‘Yeah, it was in pretty bad shape,’ and he said, ‘You kind of need a permit for that....’’”

In the end, Jim and the building inspector became good friends. “I had learned through other building projects that the best way to approach a building inspector is to say, ‘I really don’t know much about what I am doing and I am a real amateur. And I am really going to need a lot of help.’”

The building inspector put his arm around Jim and told him he understood.

“He didn’t fine me,” Jim said. “We had a good relationship, and it went on, and on, and on.”

JOINT COMPOUND IS

YOUR FRIEND In spite of what he told the building inspector, Jim had actually accumulated a fair bit of carpentry know-how over the years. “Two important rules of thumb in remodeling are that it will take twice as long and cost twice as much,” he said.

“That, and never, never, never forget that joint compound is your friend.”

These words of wisdom would serve him well over the dozen or so years that it would take to complete the renovation.

But in those early days, he didn’t know where to start. “I would walk into one room after another and go ‘Oh, jeez,’” he recalled. Finally, he arrived at a strategy or doing “just one room at a time.”

When even that proved daunting, he broke it down further: “One wall at a time.” He started in the dining room.

The walls were made of old three-coat plaster mixed with horsehair, and encrusted with layer upon layer of old wallpaper. The oldest layer in the dining room was navy blue – “a big floral brocade with bright gold that still glistened,” Jim recalled.

It was impossible to save. The plaster underneath was also in bad shape, full of cracks and holes. Inside the walls, Jim found “17 inches of dead box-elder bugs. I figure it had an R-5 insulation factor,” he said, jokingly.

Armed with buckets of joint compound, plaster screws and the fanatical attention to detail he had cultivated through his years as an oral and maxillofacial surgeon, Jim slowly got the hang of repairing the damaged walls.

At long last, the dining room was completely repaired. It was now a gleaming, orderly oasis, in the midst of ramshackle disrepair. “The walls and the ceiling were all white,” Jim recalled with wonder. “I would go in there and just stand.”

Inch by inch, wall by wall, room by room, the rest of the house got the same treatment. Over the first year, Jim would work on it for two weeks at a time, then retreat to his home in Oregon, where Susie was still living.

The walls were difficult enough, but the plaster ceilings required an especially painstaking effort to repair. “There are 235 plaster screws holding the old plaster in place, with a thin layer of fiberglass over it >>>

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all,” Jim said. “Every time I would return from a trip back to Oregon, I would say, ‘Did the ceiling cave in yet?”

It never did. By the late 1990s, Susie had retired as well; the couple transitioned to living full-time in Ouray. Together, they slowly transformed the house into their new home.

‘UPENDICULAR’

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The Opdahls added on a kitchen as part of a large addition to the north side of the house; it is done in Victorian style, and anchored with antique furniture pieces rather than built-in cabinets and countertops. (Photos by Samantha Wright) Facing page: This historic photo shows the Kullerstrand House under construction in 1898. (Photo courtesy of Jim and Susie Opdahl)

Jim did all of the structural repairs himself; he and Susie worked together on the interior finishes. They warmed to the task as they leaned into it.

“You can just be funky, you can do whatever you want in a Victorian,” Jim said.

“We didn’t have a master plan. We lived in it, and kind of got the feel for it as we went along.”

For inspiration, they traveled to the legendary Bradbury & Bradbury wallpaper factory in Benicia, Calif., where they purchased the lavish “High Victorian” handscreen-printed wallpaper now in place.

They haunted antique stores, and visited renovated Victorian homes from Kansas to California.

In the end, they found a lot to like about their own house, and decided it suited their character and lifestyle. “It’s got a lot of little rooms,” Susie explained.

In the Victorian era, when the home was built, “people didn’t have expectations of space that we do now.” With a few exceptions, they left most of those little rooms intact. “I’ve liked it,” Susie said.

“You have some privacy.”

The upstairs, however, with its long, narrow hallway lined with doors leading to small bedrooms, was too claustrophobic for their taste, so they took out one of the bedrooms and made it into an open sitting area overlooking the stairwell.

This simple move transformed the whole vibe of the second floor from “haunted house” to a gracious private retreat.

They also added on new wings, almost doubling the original square footage.

These additions allowed a new kitchen and sunroom, a woodshop for Jim, a craft-room for Susie, and a wrap-around front porch built with such attention to historic detail it looks as if Kullerstrand himself had meant to put it there all along, but never got around to it.

Blending the old and new proved to be quite a challenge, however, particularly since, as the old house had settled, it wasn’t quite plumb anymore. “And if you wanted to go plumb with the new parts right away,

it didn’t look right,” Jim explained.

He came up with a new term, “upendicular”, for blending the perpendicular new parts and the old, crooked parts, gradually.

It worked. The house today gracefully transitions from old to new. The kitchen is a perfect example.

The original house did not even have a kitchen – just a wood-burning cookstove in the cellar. Food was transported upstairs to the butler’s pantry via a dumbwaiter. In 1912, a small kitchen was tacked on. But it was a paltry little thing by today’s standards – an orphaned space, at odds with the rest of the house, that had just one cabinet, a double sink and one foot of counter space.

Susie dreamed of a kitchen big enough to spread out in that preserved the Victorian aesthetic. And that is what she got. It is easy to see why it is one of her favorite rooms in the house – anchored with antique furniture pieces rather than built-in cabinets and countertops, the space encourages lingering over cups of coffee on a winter’s morning.

She cooks on an antique 1938 stove. The centerpiece of the room is a huge wooden antique butcher block that gleams with a soul of its own.

There was white paint everywhere,” said Susie.

“Everywhere,” said Jim. “And I don’t mean just in the hall,” said Susie. “It was in the staircase –” “Out in the dining room –” said Jim. “We didn’t say much; we just got some rags,” said Susie. And the cleanup began.

Five hours later, it was clean enough that Jim could go to the bathroom without leaving a trail of white footprints down

THE WORST CALAMITY There were mishaps along the way. Toward the end of the renovation, Jim was hooking up the plumbing to an antique radiator in the parlor.

“One of the fins had a crack and went PFFFST,” Jim recalled.

“Water everywhere,” Susie said.

Then there was the paint disaster. The front hall was freshly wallpapered, and Jim had just finished putting in beautiful new ornamental tiling all around the fireplace there. It was Sunday morning, and they were getting ready for church – both still in their robes.

A gallon of white latex paint sat perched on top of the ladder in the hall.

Jim told Susie he was “just going to do a little touch-up.”

“So Jim’s moving the ladder, only thing is, there’s a light fixture that hangs down, and he didn’t notice it,” said Susie.

“The fixture hit the can of paint, and off it went,” said Jim. “I was upstairs and I heard this splat.

the hall.

“That was the worst calamity,” the two agreed.

Every couple that tackles a renovation project together has tales to tell of how it tested their relationship. For Jim and Susie, the real test came when it was time to wallpaper.

As Jim put it, “There has to be one person in charge, not two. After awhile, Susie stopped volunteering her opinions.”

Instead, she found other ways to express herself – sewing lacy curtains and plush damask swags, for example, and painting the delicate floral plasterwork that adorns the ceiling in the master bedroom upstairs.

“It was a passion for both of us for quite awhile, and that made it fun,” Susie said of the renovation. “There was something to talk about every day.”

NO REGRETS

Recently, Jim took the time to look through some old pictures from the early years of the renovation project. “It just floored me,” he admitted. “I mean, I would never do it again. I would NEVER do it again. I thought I had a five-year retirement project, and it took 12 years.”

“It isn’t ever finished,” Susie added.

“There is always something.”

Recent improvements include a sauna, a wine cellar and a bocci ball court out in the west garden.

Now is the time to enjoy the fruits of their labor. On a recent winter afternoon, as afternoon sunlight slanted in through the bay window, they sat in the front parlor and talked about their favorite parts of the house.

The antique radiators definitely make their “Top 10” list. “You can put your butt up against them, you can put your coffee cup on top, and it stays warm,” Jim explained. “And they creak and make friendly little noises in the middle of the night.”

Jim likes the library – finished in a more masculine “Arts and Crafts” architectural style, in contrast to the feminine, Victorian aesthetic of the rest of the house – but he loves his woodshop in the basement best of all.

Susie adores the dining room.

“It’s quite enclosed and cozy, right in the center of house,” she said, unlike the more formal dining rooms in a lot of new houses.

Every part of their home glows with warmth and care, and feels completely lived in. “But this kind of a house appeals to not everyone, that’s for sure,” Jim reflected. “A lot of people call it a live-in museum. We don’t feel it is. I have never thought that.

But that phrase has been used.”

Susie points out that even the antique furnishings have stories behind them. “It was fun, the time we spent out looking,” she said. “We used to hit every antique store. It was a fun couple thing to do....”

As much as they love the house, though, the Opdahls have decided it’s time to move on. Their home in Ouray was recently purchased by a couple from Texas. The deal closed in early December, and the new owners will take possession next spring. The Opdahls are exchanging their beloved Queen Anne Victorian painted lady in Ouray for a Santa

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Fe adobe in Prescott, Ariz.

“It’s been fun, and we’ve had no regrets,” Jim said. But, he admitted, for the past five winters, milder southern climes have beckoned. “And any old house has a lot of upkeep,” he added. “I have a personality disorder; I have a hard time hiring people to work on the house, when I know that I could do it better. I get real grumpy.”

The Opdahls are looking forward to new adventures in a larger city, but leaving Ouray will be bittersweet. In their years here, they have become deeply involved in the community. Susie cofounded Weehawken Creative Arts, the nonprofit organization providing highquality arts education programs and events to adults and children in Ouray County; Jim, a founding member of the Friends of the Wright Opera House, played a crucial role in that organization’s purchase and ongoing renovation of Ouray’s historic Wright Opera House.

Thy are modest about their contributions to the town, however. “This community has probably given us way more than we have given it,” Susie said. “It has been wonderful. I have some hard moments thinking about leaving.”

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LEGACY

Jim Opdahl gazed out the window of his first-floor study toward a wintery view of Twin Peaks and White House Mountain. (Photo

by Samantha Wright) Facing page: It’s hard not to fall in love with the Kullerstrand House, especially when it’s all lit up for Christmas.

(Photo by Jim Opdahl)

Shortly after the Opdahls bought the Kullerstrand House back in 1997, they and the house were memorialized in a book that came out that same year from local historian Doris Gregory. Entitled History of Ouray, Volume II, the tome documented the historic homes, buildings and people of Ouray, with an entire chapter dedicated to the Kullerstrand House. It discussed the house’s origins and traced its lineage of owners from past to present, ending with the Opdahls.

The chapter concluded with a hefty paragraph that Jim and Susie took to heart: “Looking back on close to 100 years since the house was built, it has been filled for the most part with families who cared for the house and for each other.

It is hoped that its luck will continue, for the preservation of a home depends upon owners who see it as an extension of their family, worthy of upkeep and loving care and a reminder of the many happy moments they spent there.”

Now, the Opdahls can say that they lived up to that expectation.

Joseph Paczosa, of Telluride Forge, holds a rod of steel he is in the process of forging which will soon become a work of functional art.

“When metal’s hot, its molecular structure is confused. It’s vulnerable,” he said. “That’s when you shape it.”

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artisan

Hammer and Fire, With Finesse

By Leslie Vreeland P h o t o s b y B r e t t S c h r e ck e n g o s t

he best way to understand this is to try it,” says Telluride Forge’s Joseph Paczosa.

I’m standing in a garage in Placerville, but with the pounding on the anvil, the hissing of the air compressor in the trip hammer – a 6 ft.-high, motorized behemoth designed to exert the force of a 400-pound sledgehammer hundreds of times per minute on whatever comes beneath it – and a roaring, flaming forge at the center of it all, it feels apocalyptic.

The forge alone sounds like the gas on my Weber grill, gone über-turbo. You could say I’m appropriately cautious. I feel like I fell into The Lord of the Rings, and this is Mordor.

Yet instead of Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor, hovering over my shoulder, there’s a mild-mannered, affable fellow, who just a few minutes ago confided that when he hunts an elk, it is “always a very emotional day.” He is Joseph Paczosa, the owner of Telluride Forge, and he’s urging me to use his monstrous machines to craft something that is nominally a “fire poker,” but in fact will have the heft of a weapon Tolkien’s Uruk Hai might wield in battle.

It’s loud in here, and not all of the noise is from a blacksmith’s tools. Underneath the din is, improbably, music: the soft twang of bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. Paczosa has a connection to Krauss: his brother is a recording engineer who >>>

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has worked with the singer, and Joseph himself helped to build a recording studio for her south of Nashville. A singer-songwriter is another relative, and his mother is a painter. “I was raised around art, and I tried to resist its allure, but I couldn’t,” he said, in part because he wanted to do something “useful.”

Forging seemed the perfect compromise. It not only appealed to him aesthetically, but the objects he created would be functional as well as artistic – like the 13-foot-long barbecue smoker he was putting the finishing touches on today for a local ranch.

Paczosa is besotted with blacksmithing. “I lost my heart to it,” he said. “If it wasn’t for my wife, my two kids and my dog, I’d be in here all the time.” He found his life’s calling young, in the mountains. On a day when the rest of his family was skiing at Vail, Paczosa, who grew up on the Front Range, chose to hang instead with a family friend in Minturn. The friend was an ironworker. One glimpse of the forge, and a turn at the tools, and Paczosa was smitten with the trade. “It sang to my soul,” he said. While matriculating at C.U. Denver, he apprenticed with that family friend, Steve Zorichak, at Vail Iron Creations for several years, commuting between Auraria and the mountains. He moved to the San Juans “for the challenge of earning a living here,” he said, “for the isolation, and the beauty.” He has owned Telluride Forge for 13 years. You may have seen his work, which includes the signs for the Telluride Adaptive Sports Program offices, the Tomboy Tavern and the Hotel Madeline; the railings in the Telluride Real Estate Corp. building; fireplace doors in the Tempter House, and hardware on the Alpine Chapel. He’s also done ironwork for private clients not only in this region and elsewhere in Colorado (Beaver Creek, Aspen), but from California to New York to Maui.

Paczosa is not what you picture when you imagine a blacksmith. Ironworking is a loud and burly trade that involves whacking heavy objects after blasting them with fire. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow pretty well captured the image I had in mind in “The Village Blacksmith.”

The smith, a mighty man is he with large and sinewy hands and the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.

Paczosa is not that guy. While he’ll grant you the physical exertion involved in his work is good exercise, he is not brawny, and he brings a cerebral approach to his occupation. A particular preoccupation of his is architectural restoration – “I have a reverence for history,” he told me – and he’s a graduate of a blacksmithing school whose owner shares the same enthusiasms.

Frank Turley, founder of the Turley Forge and Blacksmithing School in Santa Fe, N. Mex., specializes in architectural hardware, ornamental work and the forging of tools (also Paczosa’s passions) and, like Paczosa, is intrigued by historic blacksmithing.

Turley came to it by way of his work as part-time conservator at the Museum of New Mexico, where he had the chance to study Southwestern Hispanic artwork. The interest gave rise to a book he co-authored with Marc Simmons entitled Southwestern Colonial Artwork: The Spanish Blacksmithing Tradition From Texas to California.

The first sentence in the introduction to Turley’s book reads, “Iron is the fourth-most abundant metallic element in the composition of the earth.” That may be true, but in blacksmithing these days, iron is rarely used. Cast iron, for example, is quite brittle and cannot be forged, and is there>>>

Tools of his trade, at left, rear, a 100-pound trip hammer and, at right, firepower and muscle. Paczosa uses a hammer to pound the metal on the anvil, marshaling heat and force to create a desired shape.

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fore cast in molds. And the term “wrought iron” refers to metal that has been worked, not iron per se. The ferrous and non-ferrous metals Paczosa uses in his work include not only copper, bronze and brass but, most commonly, mild carbon steel, which is what the barbecue smoker is composed of.

It was time to complete my fire poker. We had heated a metal rod in the forge, where the temperature was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. Metal becomes a bit like clay when heated; I placed the rod on the anvil and hit it with a hammer repeatedly, as hard as I could, in order to smash and stretch it into a shape that flattened and tapered at the end. Yes, the work was strenuous, but I soon realized the essence of blacksmithing isn’t strength, but control. It’s not just a matter of getting something hot, and whacking it as hard as possible; the trick is to hit something just as hard, and as accurately, and as many times as you need to for the shape you want. “Part of the eye-and-hand coordination of a good smith is matching the force to the shape,” Paczosa said.

My next stop was the trip hammer. We had shaped the steel, and now we were going to give it some texture. I placed my bar on top of the “die,” or metal slab. A 100-pound weight was about to slam on it, at a rate of 200 times per minute. “Are you sure I should do this?” I asked. I wasn’t sure who I was addressing – myself, or Paczosa.

“Absolutely! You’ll be fine.”

He stepped on a treadle, and the hammer came down so hard and fast, it dented the bar in one thunk.

Thunk thunk thunk.

I slowly pushed the scalding metal along the plate, watching it instantly flatten beneath the hammer’s force. When the steel was sufficiently dented – it looked like it had thumbprints all over it – we flipped it over and worked the other side.

In the end, my metal wand was perfectly textured. “You’re the first one who got the rhythm right,” Paczosa said. “You wouldn’t believe how many people I’ve had in here who’ve tried this.” He treated it with a coat of hot wax, to embellish the surface and protect it. It looked like a work of art.

“I’ll cherish it,” I told Paczosa. “I won’t touch it.”

“No, no,” he replied quickly. “I don’t care what you do with it, but you’ve got to promise me. You have to use it.”

Postscript I don’t yet know what I’ll use it for, but until I do, my tool fit-for-a-warrior-princess takes up most of my kitchen table.

My husband refers to it as a Norse Berserker weapon, and minces around it so it doesn’t accidentally tumble off and crush the dog. Paczosa had said my creation would last a long time. I wondered how long, so I made a phone call to the Steel Marketing Development Institute, in Washington, D.C. Metal doesn’t go to waste, Larry Kavanagh, SMDI’s president, told me. Indeed, steel has an 88-92 percent recycle rate: “When you and your heirs are done with it, it could come back as a car, or a bridge, or a tin can.”

You mean it will outlive not only me, and everyone I’ve known and loved, but maybe even every city or town I’ve ever set foot in? That’s amazing, I said.

“It’s wild, isn’t it? It’s crazy,” Kavanagh agreed. Unless it melts, “Metal really doesn’t go away, ever.” My piece of functional art, from three hours at Telluride Forge, will be around for generations and generations.

To see examples of Joseph Paczosa’s work, visit tellurideforge.com.

At top, a 13-foot-long, handmade barbecue smoker to be used by a local ranch. Paczosa owns German, Swedish and French-style hammers (middle photo), each designed to exert a slightly different shape on heated metal. Bottom photo, a close-up of deft detailing on the smoker, testament to the hand-eye coordination of a skilled smith. On the right, the heated forge, which can reach temperatures of more than 2300 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Sweet Tagine

food & beverage

Arabian Nights Come to a Kitchen in Montrose year ago, all we knew about the exotic-looking tagine perched on top of the tall cupboard in my parents’ Florida kitchen was that it collected dust.

Now Torie and I can’t live without the heavy Moroccan cast-iron-and-ceramic contraption we lugged home to Montrose.

The go-to pot for most of our dinners, it has changed our menu planning forever, hosting explorations of sweet and savory dishes. It suits our very different cooking styles – I like to follow recipes to a T, while Torie prefers improvisation. We fight over who gets to use the tagine like other couples fight over the remote control.

Possibly the best thing about it is that it’s really hard to screw things up. Everything we cook in this exotic-looking Le Creuset pot comes out better than expected.

I’ve stopped complaining when Torie makes one of her spicy vegetarian dishes – I’ve abandoned my daily meat craving, thanks to its perfectly blended cut-up veggies, spices and dried fruit.

B y Gus J a r v i s

It’s that good.

The tagine has changed how we look at ingredients – dried fruit, most especially – and how we use our bounty of CSA vegetables in the growing season. We even love cooking on busy weeknights.

It’s all thanks to my parents, and their real estate broker, down in Ormond Beach, Fla.

Tagine Excitement, Shattered In the early days of 2013, we were visiting my parents in Florida when they heard their house had finally sold. Now they could move up to North Carolina to be near my sister. They had moved to Ormond Beach after 25 years of long winters in Silverthorne, Colo.; now, they were tired of Florida’s long, hot and humid summers.

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As we celebrated the sale poolside, sipping Landshark beers, my mom got practical, and started sizing up the contents of the house and what she would keep.

“You guys want that thing, whatever it is?” she asked, pointing to the dusty tagine on top of the cupboard. “I don’t even know what it is. We’ve never used it. I think it’s a Le Creuset.”

I mostly admire Le Creuset cookware from a distance, so her name-dropping piqued my interest. Standing on a chair, I pulled it down. Blowing the dust off its wizard-hatted lid, I said, “Sure. We’ll take it.”

The next morning, at the airport, I began researching the cone-shaped contraption I’d stashed in my suitcase. I watched YouTube videos of tagines in action. I downloaded Joyce Goldstein’s The Tagine Deck onto my iPad for the flight home. I immersed myself in the exotic world of Moroccan and North African slow stovetop tagine cooking.

The tagine’s cool, cone-shaped lid locks in moisture and flavor, condensing the steam rising up from the stovetop-heated >>>

pot beneath, and dripping it down, back into the simmering stew.

But even more unusual than the tagine’s design were the recipes in Goldstein’s cookbook, featuring fresh vegetables, slowcooked meats and exotic spices like cumin, cinnamon, coriander pods, saffron threads and turmeric. While we already had most of these spices, what we didn’t have was the host of dried fruits – apricots, raisins, dates and preserved lemons.

I’d have to wait for the preserved lemons, which are brined and fermented for a couple of weeks, but by the time we got to Montrose, I had dinner planned.

Then I opened my roller bag. The tagine’s ceramic lid had shattered into a thousand pieces. I blame the Transportation Security Administration.

Sweet Heat on a Cold Winter Night 44

In the two weeks it took for Le Creuset to send me a replacement (at about a third of the cost of a new tagine, I’m happy to report), I had just enough time to ferment a quart canning jar of preserved lemons.

So now, I started with a lemon chicken tagine recipe, combining one cut-up chicken, garlic, turmeric, cilantro, chicken stock and preserved lemons to simmer in the tagine for just over two hours.

It was amazing. The aroma was irresistible, the sauce was thick and tangy, the chicken was tender. Slightly sweet, plenty of tang, savory – all in one dish. The preserved lemons worked their magic, with an addictive sour and salty flavor. We lingered over dinner, discussing future tagine recipes.

A few nights later, using the tagine cookbook Le Creuset included with our replacement pot, we made a spicy vegetable tagine, using the Harissa paste we’d bought awhile back at an ethnic food store in Portland, Ore. With its thick and spicy broth, loaded with carrots, onions, celery, tomatoes and eggplant, this was one vegetarian dish we could agree on. We didn’t even wait for couscous before consuming our second tagine meal; this one-pot dinner was ready in just 35 minutes.

Half a year and probably a hundred tag-

The gift of an unused and dusty tagine sparked a discovery of the spicy, sweet and savory flavors of Morocco in the Jarvis kitchen. Pictured clockwise from top left are freshly toasted and ground spices along with sliced fennel; homemade preserved lemons; Torie Jarvis and the Le Creuset tagine; the beginnings of a lemon chicken tagine and its completion; spices are poured into a lamb, fennel and dates tagine. (Photos by Gus Jarvis)

ine dinners later, our favorite recipe so far is a Moroccan lamb tagine, with fennel and dates (another recipe in the trusty book that came with the replacement pot). It’s a perfect combination of meat, fruits and sweet vegetables, featuring thinly sliced fennel bulbs, lamb cubes, pitted and chopped dates and a range of spices including ginger, cumin, coriander and cayenne pepper. (I use my old electric-chopper coffee grinder, gathering dust since I bought my burr grinder, to blend whole-seed spices that ratchet up the flavor even further.) At first, we thought the dates made the dish too sweet; then, the heat of the cayenne pepper hit.

Sweet heat, tender lamb, a cold winter night – this is as comforting as it gets.

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Tagine Distractions Some days, when I’m at my desk, or maybe sitting through an excruciating county meeting, I find myself planning the coming night’s tagine feast.

Meat or no meat? Maybe chicken. Fresh veggies, or should I pick through the veggies in the bottom of the refrigerator? As for dried fruit – golden raisins, or the last of those Mediterranean apricots in the pantry?

By mid-afternoon, I’m thinking obsessively about what will go into the bright blue-topped tagine, and about how the longer the meat cooks, slow, at a low temperature, the more tender it will be.

Often, I come home early from work, full of tagine dreams, and find Torie has beat me to the punch, with the tagine simmering away already, the house filling with yet another new medley of flavors.

Who knew a dusty kitchen ornament could unlock a new culinary adventure?

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House of the Traveling B Y m a r t i n i qu e da v i s P HOTO S B Y B RETT S C HRE C K ENGO S T

The Delves did not set out to achieve a 100 percent energy offset when their 5,300 sq. ft. Mountain Village home was being designed and built in the early years of the 21st century, but found themselves perfectly positioned, a few years later, to take the Telluride- Renewed Challenge and go solar.

unlight streams through expansive southfacing windows on a winter afternoon at the Delves’ home on Russell Drive.

“This house is all about the sun,” said former Mountain Village Mayor Bob Delves.

Before the house was built, Delves and his wife, Jenny, would walk the lot, near the fourth tee on the golf course, marveling at how the sun’s rays moved across their property.

When architect Dave Gibson started designing the house, which was built in 2005, the sun’s travels across the lot were key to his design. Back then, the design’s adherence to the pattern of the sun reflected the cou>>>

47

Taking Solar to the Max In a Traditionally-Built Mountain Village Home

48

The home on Russell Drive boasts an airy open-format main living room on the entry floor, showcasing floor-to-ceiling windows that double as conduits for passive solar gain.

ple’s desire to maximize their location’s sunny southern exposure, especially in the short days of Telluride’s long winter.

Nearly a decade ago, sustainable energy wasn’t the catch phrase it is today, but its solar-sensitive design nonetheless makes this 5,300 sq. ft. mountain home that is almost 100 percent energy neutral a rarity in the mountains, even today.

The Delves did not set out to achieve a 100 percent energy offset when their home was being designed and built, but a few years later, when Mountain Village teamed up with Telluride to embark on the Telluride-Renewed Challenge, the couple decided to go solar. The goal of the Challenge, a joint endeavor between

the only two towns in the U.S. connected by a gondola, is to create enough new and local renewable electricity to supply 100 percent of both towns’ electricity consumption by 2020.

“Significant changes in our energy behavior can only happen when individuals take action themselves,” said Bob. With that in mind, he said, “Jenny and I took it on as a personal challenge” to achieve energy-neutral status in their home.

To that end, they embarked upon a multi-year quest to understand just exactly what could be achieved, in terms of energy savings, in a traditionally built, 5,300 sq. ft. mountain home.

What they found has surprised them.

THERMOSTAT AT 60 DEGREES The Delves home on Russell Drive boasts an airy open-format main living area on the entry floor, showcasing floorto-ceiling windows framing southern mountain vistas that double as conduits for passive solar gain. The heat generated just by the sun’s rays is remarkable, Delves said: On a recent winter day, with the thermostat set to 60 degrees, the temperature in the room hovered at 68.

The modern kitchen – an extension of the main living area – takes full advantage of sunlight streaming from the west as well, thanks to bay windows that channel light to an opposite wall that then reflects

49

The architect deliberately softened the entry-level space by incorporating arches where right angles tend to be, from the doorways to ceiling joints.

some of that light back into the room. A formal dining area – nestled into the main living space, it’s a sort of room within a room – plays into the open feel of the main floor. Architect Gibson deliberately softened the entry-level space by incorporating arches where right angles tend to be, from the doorways to ceiling joists.

The result is a grand living and dining space that feels bigger than it actually is.

“There is not a lot of superfluous space,” Delves noted of the home’s design.

‘FUNCTION OVER FORM’ “This is completely function over form,” Delves said. “We only built the

spaces we would need, so we only heat the spaces we need.”

The theme of spatial efficiency continues throughout the structure, with its three downstairs bedrooms and a den, and upstairs, with the master suite and woodpaneled study.

The home’s lowest level, built partway into the gently sloping hillside, takes advantage of the insulating effects of its below-grade construction (the wine cellar remains at a cool 58 degrees in both summer and winter, with no manmade temperature controls), while the upstairs reaps the benefits of the heat rising from south- and west-facing windows on the entry level. On a cool winter afternoon,

windows in the study are cracked to allow hot air to escape.

Many of the wood and stone accents throughout the home were either sourced locally, like the stone framing the main living room fireplace, which comes from Ouray, or recycled, like the exterior wood paneling from an old warehouse in Oakland, Calif. dating back to the Spanish-American War. But what makes this residence truly stand apart is what it doesn’t have – notably, a large electric bill.

After taking on the Telluride-Renewed Challenge, the Delves and their three sons took a hard look at their energy-consuming behaviors, and initiated a series of changes that took a significant bite out of their en>>>

‘The heat generated just by the sun’s rays is remarkable.’

The theme of spacial efficiency continues throughout the structure. A formal dining area is nestled into the main living room (counterclockwise from bottom, right); the master bedroom, complete with a fireplace; a family gathering area.

50

ergy usage. By being conscious of certain habits – for example, instead of using the electric dryer, hanging their clothes to dry; avoiding unnecessary for-show lighting and installing energy-efficient bulbs throughout the house, instead; setting the thermostat to low in unused spaces of the house; turning off the icemaker and draining and turning off the hot tub – the family realized significant energy savings.

At the same time, they enlisted the expertise of Ridgway’s Alternative Energy Enterprises to install 24 180-watt photovoltaic solar panels, with a total generating capacity of 4,320 watts (4.32 kilowatts), or about 50 percent of the home’s post-con-

servation consumption.

Then, in 2012, the San Miguel Power Association unveiled its Community Energy Collective, a large solar farm in Paradox Valley. The Delves’ determined how many panels were needed to offset the remaining 50 percent of their electricity consumption, and bought 18 panels from CEC. Now, Delves can log into his online accounts to check his home’s real-time monitoring system, seeing just how much power his solar panels, both at home, and on the solar farm’s panels is generating. It is online, amid a maze of graphs and numbers, where the changes the family has made in its energy consumption in recent years reflects

the tangible result of their successful energyreduction challenge.

On a clear day last winter, the Delves’ on-site and solar farm panels combined to produce 42.5 kilowatt hours of power: in other words, the energy produced by the home and its solar farm panels could have powered 425 100-watt bulbs for one hour each.

What that amounts to over time, in dollars and cents, is a monthly credit on the Delves’ power bill that is equal to or greater than the amount of energy their home uses each month – tangible proof that this conventionally-built mountain home truly can walk the energy conservation walk.

‘We only built the spaces we would need, so we only heat the spaces we need.’

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feature

The

Wright Answer

A Herculean Effort to Preserve and Restore Ouray’s Iconic Opera House

By Samantha Wright

I

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t’s been a long, strange trip for Ouray’s beloved Wright Opera House, since it first opened its doors 125 years ago, in December 1888.

The brick behemoth that anchors the 500 block of Main Street is today renowned for its decorative blue-and-white painted facade – said to be the nation’s premier example of a Mesker Brothers iron front – and its arching antique windows that reflect the intricate alpine splendor of the Amphitheater.

But there is plenty of substance, and a great survival story, beneath that facade.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Wright Opera House is that it is still being used for its original purpose as a venue for the performing arts, at a time when most of Colorado’s 150 original opera houses have long since burned down or been converted to more mundane purposes.

The Wright Opera House might have succumbed to this fate, as well, if not for the Friends of the Wright Opera House, a small group of Ouray residents that coalesced in 2008 to purchase, preserve and renovate the building.

Some dismissed it as a hopeless cause, but the community caught their vision and rallied to their support. Today the nonprofit organization has achieved its mission, and is breathing new life into the aging venue.

LEGITIMATE ENTERTAINMENT Together with the Beaumont Hotel, Ouray County Courthouse, original public school and Miners Hospital (which now houses the Ouray County Historical Museum), the Wright Opera House was one of the most imposing structures in Ouray during the late 1880s and early 1890s, made of local brick from the old Carney brickyard in Ouray. >>>

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Ouray’s Wright Opera House today, renowned for its decorative blue-and-white painted facade, is thought to be the nation’s premier example of a Mesker Brothers iron front. (Photo by Jim Opdahl). Across the top, left to right, two details from its Mesker Bros. iron front (photos by Samantha Wright), and the Opera House in the first half of the 20th century (courtesy photo).

The Wright has always had commercial businesses on the ground floor; today’s tenants are the Blue Pear gift store and, next door, the Artisan Bakery. (Photo

by Jim Opdahl)

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The building sits astride two 25-foot lots on the 500 block of Main Street, and makes a significant contribution to the Ouray Historic District. It is also a candidate for an individual listing on the National Register of Historic Places. It has a solid stone foundation, and a cavernous basement with a center column that runs down the middle, from front to back. Its walls vary in thickness from five to seven bricks thick, and are lined with old three-coat plaster.

Massive, exposed rough-hewn ceiling trusses hold the frame together like a trestle, leading historical architect Michael Bell, who conducted a structural assessment of the building 2008, to conclude it was probably designed by mining engineers.

This would make perfect sense, considering the man who built it. Ed Wright and his brother, George, natives of Canada, made their way to Ouray via Silverton in the winter of 1875. Together, the two established the Wheel of Fortune Mine in the Mt. Sneffels Mining District. The mine was soon producing impressive quantities of valuable ore, and the Ouray Times declared it to be “one of the best mines in the whole San Juan country.” The brothers sold part-interest in the mine to two investors for $160,000 in 1877, and established themselves as “gentlemen of means” in the burgeoning Ouray community.

The story of the origins of the Wright Opera House a decade later may be apocryphal; it is said that Ed Wright built it at the urging of his wife, Letitia, who wanted to improve the cultural environment of Ouray for their young daughter, Irene.

The year was 1888, and like any mining boomtown, Ouray had plenty to offer in the way of less-than-virtuous attractions, down in the red light district on Second Street.

The Gold Belt Theater had just opened up with an impressive variety of entertainment – bands, variety shows, booze, gambling and

Through the years, it has housed an early-day car dealership, a gas station, a drug store, a hardware store, and for decades, a Jeep rental and tour business. Today, it is home to a bakery and whimsical girls, girls, girls! As historian Doris Gregory put it, the offerings “were attracting even the ‘better’ element in Ouray.”

At the opposite end of town, the Wright Opera House would be built adjacent to another commercial property that Ed Wright had developed in 1881, called the Wright Building, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Main Street. The opera house went up in a hurry. Construction got underway in the summer of 1888, and the Opera House opened on Dec. 4 that same year, with a grand benefit concert and ball to raise money for uniforms for the Ouray Magnolia Band.

Much ado was made of the event in the local paper, the Solid Muldoon, which had long been clamoring for Ouray to have an opera house of its own. Almost all towns in Colorado had one in the late 1800s, although most of them never actually hosted opera performances.

As historian Charles Ralph explained in his online article, “Opera in Old Colorado” (operaoldcolo.info), “To distinguish between the bawdy, low-class places of entertainment that many theatres were at the time, it became common practice to call a town’s foremost playhouse an ‘opera house’ and thus make it known that only socially acceptable, legitimate theatre would be tolerated there.”

The next evening of “legitimate” entertainment” to be held at the Wright Opera House occurred a few weeks later, on Dec. 19, 1888, when “Professors David and Laux” gave a program of piano and organ duets.

And so it all began.

SUCKER TOWN The street level portion of the building was always used for commercial purposes.

gift shop.

But the theater space upstairs “wasn’t highly used or highly profitable” in those early years, said Friends of the Wright Opera House Board President Dee Williams. It appeared that many early Ourayites still preferred the more rowdy offerings down at the other end of town.

“When the Gold Belt Theatre was running full tilt, they would send a band to the Wright Opera House, and march through Main Street to get people to go down to the Gold Belt,” she said.

As for Ed and Letitia Wright, “He was a miner and she was a wife and mother; they were not entrepreneurs. They did not have great business acumen, and the Opera House did not flourish,” Williams said.

Ed Wright died suddenly of pneumonia in 1895. Letitia, upon assuming management of the Opera House, soon discovered that her husband “had borrowed heavily to make his investments and had many unpaid bills,” as Gregory recounted in her book about the building’s history.

George Wright and his wife Lenora paid off the bills and assumed ownership of the building to keep it in the family.

“George ran it for awhile and hired somebody who was a promoter to run it,” Williams said. Many of the acts that came through in that period were far from what Letitia must have had in mind, back when the building was built for the edification of her daughter.

“On the entertainment circuit, with the kinds of acts that were put on at the Wright, Ouray became known as a sucker town,” Williams said. “Whatever act was performed here, we would come and see it.”

Dancers in colorful tutus scamper up the fire escape to enter the backstage of the Wright Opera House during a Weehawken Dance performance. (Photo by Samantha Wright)

By 1915, the age of opera houses was in decline.

George and Lenora eventually gave up and sold the Wright, and it slid into a long period of socalled “quiet years.”

But when the Friends of the Wright Opera House began the process of acquiring the building back in 2008, they got to know it on a more intimate level than had ever been chronicled in books and newspapers. Under the stage, for example, they discovered a treasure trove of old props – spears, hats, feathers, fabric togas – as well as a few mummified “four-legged things with fur” and, best of all, its original painted backdrop of the Mt. Sneffels range, based on a famous William Jackson photograph.

Backstage, they discovered a century’s worth of old graffiti bearing witness to the events that took place there over the years.

If those walls could talk, they’d have stories to tell. “Like lots of old theaters, there were probably a few maidens who had some firsts up there,” FWOH Treasurer Jim Opdahl speculated.

Several clues FWOH uncovered about the Wright Opera House’s construction – from sloppy brickwork, to the lack of a central heating system and an unfinished ceiling – suggest it was built on the cheap.

“My guess is that they ran out of money,” Williams said. “This place was a garage and jeep rental much longer than an opera house.”

Perhaps what saved the Wright Opera House in those early years was that it became somewhat of a community center. It was frequently used by the Ouray School as a venue for school dances, athletic events, contests of elocution, and theater productions (including a well-documented production of A Tom Thumb Wedding put on by first graders in 1907). Legend has it that it that it hosted a Jack Dempsey boxing match on at least one occasion.

THE WAY OF PROGRESS While the building went through a long dormant period, a handful of people in the community never lost sight of the Wright as a venue for the performing arts.

Willliams recalls a time several decades ago when one local entrepreneur wanted to remodel the building, tearing out its stainedglass windows and other historic embellishments, and put an all-you-can-eat-style cafeteria upstairs. Then-local newspaper editor Joyce Jorgensen and Ouray native son Roger Henn joined forces to vocally oppose the plan. “There was no committee devoted to historical preservation at the time,” Williams said. “But Roger and Joyce got on it, and made [the entrepreneur’s] life miserable, and he eventually said, ‘Screw it!’

“The interesting thing is that the uproar was mostly against Joyce and Roger for standing in the way of progress. I think it is really a miracle the Wright is still here.”

For a number of years, the theater space was completely abandoned. C.W. McCall (aka Bill Fries), a country-western singer most famous for his 1976 hit song Convoy, was the first to bring it back to life with his multimedia slide show, the San Juan Odyssey.

Fries and his family signed a lease for the second floor theater space in 1975. He and his sons spent the following year photographing the San Juan Mountains in all four seasons. They set their slide show to the music of Aaron Copland, as performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. It was narrated, of course, by C.W. McCall.

The show opened in 1977 and ran for 20 years, becoming a staple of summer entertainment in Ouray, seen by thousands upon thousands of visitors. It was state-of-

the-art entertainment for its time, with the equivalent of surround-sound, 15 computer-controlled and synchronized 35mm slide projectors and five screens connected in a 50-foot-wide panorama to portray the beauty and drama of the San Juan Mountains.

The show finally shut down in 1996. The Wright Opera House had new owners, Larry and Alice Leeper, who had other ideas about how to use the space. For a number of years, a movie theater operated there. It wasn’t until an organization called Weehawken Creative Arts leased the upper floor of the Wright Opera House as a dance studio and performance space that the theater became truly vibrant once again.

FWOH gives a lot of credit to the Weehawken Dance program for awakening community passion for the Wright Opera House. With children coming in and out of the theater on a daily basis for dance classes, and performances like The Nutcracker being mounted on the Wright’s old stage to enthusiastic audiences numbering in the hundreds, the Wright seemed to bubble and fizz with new life.

“The buzz in the room was just contagious,” Williams said. “People were blown away by what could happen in this space. It would have been much more difficult to raise funds to purchase the building if Weehawken had not opened the doors to the possibility of what was here. People realized how important it is to have a performance space.”

It was 2007, at the height of Ouray’s real estate boom. After owning the building for 10 years and conducting extensive renovations, the Leepers were willing to sell the Wright for $1.4 million.

IN LOVE WITH THIS OLD LADY Shortly afterward came the crash.

The Leepers were more anxious than ever to sell, and suggested to Williams, Op>>>

57

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dahl and several others who were passionate about the building that they form a committee to look into buying it. The Friends of the Wright Opera House came into being, made up, in those early days, of Williams, Opdahl, Nancy Nixon, Joyce Linn, Tom Kenning and Ralph Huesing.

On the one hand, their timing seemed impeccably lousy. Ouray was in the midst of the worst economic crisis it had seen in decades.

“I remember my husband saying to me, ‘There is no way in hell you will ever raise enough money to buy this opera house,” Williams recalled.

But with real estate values in free-fall, the Leepers soon dropped their asking price to $750,000, which put it into the realm of barely attainable.

“With stars in our eyes, we said, ‘Let’s raise the money to buy it,” Williams recalled. And they got to work. The goal may have been lofty, but the strategy was simple.

“We just asked everybody,” Williams said.

Once the pledges started rolling in, a couple of second homeowners stepped out of the wings with significant donations.

If the community had not stepped up to the plate in such a big way, an effort to purchase the building would have surely foundered. The charitable foundations the Friends had planned to approach for funding had also been hit hard by the economic downturn, and in some cases were giving 75 percent less than they would have, just a year before.

The Friends did succeed in winning modest grants from a few foundations. The State Historic Fund made up the difference, kicking in $225,000 toward the acquisition effort, but requiring they raise more matching funds from the community by the end of the year, or return the money.

“We were in jeopardy of losing the grant at the end of 2009,” Williams recalled, and went to local fundraising guru Kelvin Kent

The Friends of the Wright Opera House board members took the keys from former owners Alice and Larry Leeper at the closing in February 2010.

Front row: Joyce Linn, Dee Williams, Alice Leeper, Larry Leeper. Back row: Valerie Hill, Nancy Nixon, Jim Opdahl, title agent Ed Folga. (Courtesy photo)

Dancers getting ready for a performance at the Wright. (Photo by Samantha Wright)

for advice. “We were all prepared to return the money,” Williams said. “But Kelvin said, ‘Let’s kick into high gear and make a real passionate plea.”

It worked.

“I remember calling donors I thought had already given a huge amount, and sucking in my breath and saying, ‘Can you give more?’

And they did,” Williams said, still amazed.

In the end, they brought their very biggest local donors back in, and made one final pitch to them as well. “ I remember standing there and to my embarrassment, breaking into tears,” Williams said.

FWOH’s passion for the project carried their effort across the finish line. Soon, they had sufficient funds in the bank account to satisfy the match. They notified the Colorado Historic Fund, triggering the legal process to complete the acquisition grant to purchase the Wright Opera House. The closing happened the following February.

Opdahl still marvels that they pulled it off, in the midst of such dire economic times.

Altogether, local donors contributed almost $400,000 toward the acquisition. That support has continued over the years, with residents continuing to donate money to help pay for the building’s operating expenses and now, for its renovation.

“It is a project that is not difficult to get excited about,” Opdahl said. “It is easy to fall in love with this old lady.”

BALANCING ACT Williams and Opdahl laugh now about how naive they were when they took this all on.

“We had this romantic idea of saving the Wright,” Opdahl said. “On the day of the

closing, we looked at each other and said, ‘Now what do we do?’ We had no concept of what would be involved.”

“Raising the money to purchase the building was the easy part,” Williams added.

“Now we are faced with the hard part. We sit in a lot of meetings, figuring out everything from the renovation to operations, making it all work together so the Wright stays true to its intent. It’s a real balancing act.”

When they first bought the Wright Opera House, FWOH consulted with Ridgway architect Doug MacFarlane to begin envisioning the building’s interior transformation. Preliminary drawings showed a radically altered ground-level entry area with a sweeping grand staircase rising to the lobby and theater on the second level. Upstairs, the group dreamed of a larger lobby area where concert-going crowds could comfortably mingle, and a deeper theater, made possible by a large addition to the back of the building, that would also allow for more spacious backstage and green room areas.

Opdahl now says those plans were “naive – and just a million or two dollars out of reach.”

Today, Opdahl and Williams are relieved that they never pursued such grand plans.

The theater itself, it turns out, is already the perfect size. It can comfortably seat 200 – about as big as Ouray’s audiences typically get. Today, they have refined the vision to renovating and updating what exists now.

Roof and foundation repairs may not be exciting or romantic, but it’s a start, as is some modest remodeling to create a proper box office and lobby area on the first floor. Aesthetic improvements have been made in the theater area, as well, including the painstaking removal of decades’ worth of paint and plaster to expose one of the beautiful historic brick walls inside the theater, and the acquisition of new seating as well as a new state-ofthe-art sound system and movie screen.

The next big structural improvements come in early 2014, with the long-awaited installation of an elevator, and additional remodeling in the lobby area upstairs.

Today, Weehawken Creative Arts has outgrown the space it once helped bring back to life. But there are plenty of other performing arts events at the Wright these days, even in the midst of renovations, from summer melodrama to professional theater and dance productions to weekly movie nights to excellent live music offerings in a variety of genres.

Part-time Ouray residents Jay and Jackie Lauderdale are some of the Wright’s biggest fans and supporters. Two years ago, with the goal of putting the Wright Opera House

The walls of the backstage area are covered with a century’s worth of graffiti. (Photo by Samantha Wright)

on the map as a music venue, they offered to underwrite a three-year summer concert series, bringing in nationally known singersongwriters to the Wright’s historic stage.

“It was a slave ship,” Williams said. “We were here all the time.” The FWOH’s only paid employee, a part-time administrative assistant, found herself working 50-60 hour weeks.

The Friends bumped up the size of their board to share the load, but even so, “Tons of

stuff fell through the cracks,” Williams said.

“It had become a much, much, much bigger project than we ever anticipated. We needed an executive director.”

So a year ago, FWOH took the leap and hired Josh Gowans to manage the day-to-day running of the theater and oversee its renovation and ongoing fundraising efforts.

One of the first things Gowans did when he came on board was to visit the Sheridan Opera House in Telluride and the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen to get a feel for how they were run. It was an eye-opening experience.

“It’s a whole different world,” he said.

“They already have renovated buildings and huge staffs and still, they were telling us, they are just trying to break even.”

The Wright is in an even tougher situation that those other opera houses, Gowans said, because it is located in a community with more modest means, yet is still faced with the challenge of renovating. Still, he is optimistic it can be done.

Gowans anticipates that most of the funding for the renovation will come from major donors and large grants.

In the meantime, “A lot of the support

Dancers await their cue backstage during a Weehawken Dance performance. (Photo by Samantha Wright)

we want to see from the community is just to have them in here, so the Wright Opera House can be the community venue it was meant to be,” he said. “That support will keep the lights on, the staff paid, and the beer in the kegs.”

Williams’ ultimate vision for the Wright Opera House is to grow it into an economic engine for the town. “I’d really like this to be the reason people come to Ouray,” she said.

“I think we can do that.”

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resh homegrown basil in January is a mouth-watering notion, but only for those high-altitude gardeners who have mastered the many pitfalls of indoor gardening.

Now, a grower for Colorado’s booming marijuana trade has implemented innovative systems that an aspiring indoor gardener can put to good advantage – even for non-psychoactive produce.

At the Alpine Wellness dispensary’s indoor grow operation, Nolan Murphy oversees 24 grow cycles a year. Home gardeners can take a few lessons from Murphy’s gardening system to coax from seed to harvest anything from fresh greens to herbs to tomatoes, even when Old Man Winter has his firm grip on the outdoors.

Let There Be Light

62

Seriously cultivating plants indoors requires maintaining certain environmental conditions, with optimal lighting, circulating air, dechlorinated water and nutrients that are essential for plants to survive and flourish.

Meeting plants’ lighting needs through all stages of growth is essential for healthy yields, but different growth stages require different lighting systems.

Once a plant pokes through the soil, it’s in the “vegetative stage,” which typically lasts eight weeks, and indoor vegetating plants require 24-hour lighting from either fluorescent or metal halide bulbs. Alpine Wellness bathes its vegetating crop in fluorescent light, using Hydrofarm’s T5 line of lighting rigs that hang from the ceiling. A four-bulb T5 rig costs around $200, and is available at hydrofarm.com/product. Murphy says it’s money well spent; because these rigs are purpose-built, it’s easy to adjust the height of the fixture to the height of the plant. He suggests keeping the lighting rigs about six inches from the tops of the vegetating plants for the first eight weeks.

Murphy advises against metal halide lighting, which affects room temperature, causing it to spike over the recommended range of >>>

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Mike Manuell amidst the flowering plants at the Alpine Wellness greenhouse absorbing rays from high-pressure sodium bulbs.

64

cutline Murphy recommends “bubbling” tap water for 24 hours prior to watering the plants, and keeping its temperature at 75° F to avoid shocking the plants. High pressure sodium bulbs give the flowering plants the rays they need.

75 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit for most indoor plants. “Metal halide lighting gives off the same amount of light as fluorescent,” he says, but extra ventilation and cooling is required.

After the first eight weeks, once the crop’s consumable buds begin to grow, Murphy switches to an LED lighting system (his comes from hydroponicshut.com).

Alternatively, gardeners can use highpressure sodium bulbs during the bloom phase, “but they run extremely hot,” he cautions, necessitating a ventilation or cooling system. For the serious gardener, Murphy says, a $500 LED system “pays for itself, given the expense and complexity of the sodium bulb alternative.”

Maintaining the Ideal Temperature Heaters and air conditioners are essential to keep a grow room at the recom-

mended 75 degrees F, and Alpine Wellness uses a pricey purpose-built heating, ventilation and air conditioning system to maintain the right temperatures

‘organic fertilizers give the buds a bolder taste and really help the plants grow better.’

throughout each phase in the grow cycle.

But for the hobbyist gardener, Murphy suggests a few space heaters to keep the room toasty on chilly winter nights.

Avoid propane and kerosene heaters, which give off a glowing orange light that can impact the light from the fluorescent and LED fixtures. Instead, Murphy recommends high-end electric space heaters, with fine-tuned temperature dials for dispensing just the right amount of heat. In summer, he says, the right temperatures are best maintained with an air conditioner, and once again, he cautions against cutting corners with cheap air-conditioning units. “Purchasing a window unit air conditioner that’s a little higher-end, with a good temperature dial, will go a long way in making your crops happier,” he says.

Installing a system of indoor temperature gauges, and monitoring the room’s temperature and humidity, takes the guesswork out. At Alpine Wellness, a series of temperature and humidity sensors stretches across the 1,800 sq. ft. facil-

cutline

The dispensary will eventually switch to LED lighting, once that technology becomes more affordable. Flowering plants get 12 hours of light, followed by 12 hours of darkness.

ity. But for the spare-bedroom gardener, Murphy says, the $20-or-so sensors available online or in stores work just fine.

The Real Dirt Murphy disdains hydroponics, or plants grown in water instead of soil.

“I think your best method is sticking to soil,” he says. “Hydroponic systems are expensive, and they’re pretty complicated for a first-time grower.” For his crops, Murphy turns to the nutrient-rich Ocean Forest variety of Fox Farms potting soil, which contains, he says, sufficient nutrients for fostering and promoting growth in most plants throughout their life cycle.

But soil alone doesn’t offer all the nutrients plants need in life, and even the most basic gardening calls for fertilizer.

Many indoor marijuana growers use chemical fertilizers, but Murphy discour-

ages the use of unnatural additives, opting instead for Jamaican Bat Guano and other organic fertilizers to supplement his plants’ nutrition.

In the world of pot farming, he says, “organic fertilizers give the buds a bolder taste and really help the plants grow better.” But ultimately, “it doesn’t really matter which type or brand of fertilizers you use,” he says. “Just find something you think works for you and is in your price range.”

Throughout all stages of growth, Murphy recommends a waterproof pH meter to tell gardeners just what’s going on in their water and soil. The $50 Oakton EcoTester, available online, is a precise pH meter, helping growers optimize the pH levels in the soil and water. Pot’s pH sweet spot is found between 5.8 and 6.3, and that range works for almost all vegetables you can grow indoors.

Cool, Clear Water Every novice gardener knows that, in addition to sufficient light and good soil, plants need enough water to flourish. But when tap water is highly chlorinated, it can kill some of the microorganisms in the soil. “There are many ways around this problem,” Murphy says, some more expensive than others. That said, “cheap and simple solutions” abound.

At Alpine Wellness, Murphy says, “We ‘bubble’ our water for 24 hours in a system that kind of resembles an aquarium filtration system.” The home gardener doesn’t need to get that fancy, he says. “With a five-gallon bucket, an air pump and an air stone, you can get much of the additives out of the water.”

Simple air filtration systems are readily available online, and Murphy recommends bubbling the water for 24 hours prior to watering. It should be at 75 degrees F so as not to shock the plants.

65

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