A Modern Mountain Home in Canmore

Click here to view more photos of this home.

The Three Sisters loom through a bank of 16 windows that make up its great room’s south wall. The master bedroom’s ample windows reveal a north vista, toward Banff, that is nothing but jagged Rockies, poplar branches and mature spruce trees.

East, across the Bow Valley, another snow-dusted peak peeks through a rectangular pocket window in the modern kitchen. It looks like a realist mountain painting instead of a natural scene that changes with the seasons.

But who needs art when you’ve got a view like this?

“I wanted everything up here to speak for itself,” says Karen Tustanoff, who lives in the newly erected 3,400-square-foot mountain chalet with her husband, Kyle Pressman. The couple have redesigned five homes in the area since 1998, but this is the first they’ve built from the ground up.

If practice makes perfect, this house is the end result.

Tustanoff is a self-confessed home design-magazine addict and chose every detail. She made a conscious effort to maximize the home’s spectacular views, thus keeping the art, knick-knacks and toys — both toddler and chew — to a minimum.  

With nary a throw pillow out of place, there is no evidence a three-year-old little girl and a hulk of a dog share the house. No blocks or rubber balls litter the great room’s bamboo floor, no coloured markers and stacks of construction paper clutter up the kitchen’s white-quartz counters. The smaller residents’ presence is revealed only when Juna’s xylophone music bangs its way up the custom, open-riser fir stairs and Rudy, the rottweiler-shepherd-akita cross, lifts his head from his bed on the spacious deck to watch a car roll by on the street below.

From outside the two-storey house looks like a mountain — a modern one, anyway — rising up all stacked slate, glass windows, cedar siding and fir supports and railings, from a rectangular lot just blocks from Canmore’s Main Street and, literally, a stone’s throw from the Bow River.

“My inspiration was definitely mid-century modern. I love clean lines. I like bright. I like organic wood, stone,” says Tustanoff, seated on a white Eames-inspired chair. Juna sits on her lap, the box of processed cookies somewhat out of place in front of her on the black walnut table.

“Rustic materials with modern lines,” says Pressman, a local realtor, summing up the home’s look. “We had an idea of what we wanted and [architect Robb Findlay, of Findlay Design Group] drew it.”

They wanted an adult space that was also kid- and pet-friendly; one where all the living could take place on one main level. Since their house towers above the neighbouring homes, Tustanoff and Pressman instructed Findlay to design the home with the main living areas and bedrooms on the second floor, to take advantage of the views.

The family considers the enormous living room, two ample guestrooms and bathroom on the lower level as bonus space, rarely venturing down there. After walking up the stairs from the garage, they stay put and live fully in the upper half of the house.

The vaulted, open-concept great room, dining room and kitchen take up the front portion of the upper, main floor. In the back, down a short hallway, French doors open to the master bedroom suite, also vaulted.

Hang a left just before the doors and a sign marks Juna’s bedroom, bright and cozy. It’s the toy depository, filled with stuffies, books and playthings, which partially cover a colourful patterned area rug. Here, an adorable child-sized, Eames-inspired rocker knock-off brings mid-century modern to the next generation.

“I wanted it to be a playroom,” says Tustanoff. She wagered that if Juna’s room was adjacent to theirs — and the main living area — her daughter would play in there, keeping toy migration to a minimum. The plan worked. Juna’s bedroom also has extra insulation and is relatively soundproof.

The couple considered these details when working with Findlay and Tim Corbett, of Tebroc Construction, to build a house to suit their lifestyle. Other examples abound.

For example, they eschewed a home office in favour of larger rooms they’d actually use, since in today’s wireless world of laptops any couch or chair becomes an instant desk. Tustanoff chose floors of oversized ceramic tile in the kitchen and composite bamboo in the great room and downstairs living room for their durability.

“We wanted hard floors that Rudy couldn’t scratch,” she says.  

As a bonus, bamboo is a green product, as are the triple-pane windows, spray foam insulation, dual-flush toilets and that low-VOC white paint that covers most walls.

“The main focus when we were building here was making it as efficient as possible and source locally,” says Corbett, noting the Town of Canmore adheres to a Built Green program for new builds. The third-party certification program looks at operational systems, building materials and indoor and outdoor finishes among other categories to make sure homes are built with reduced environmental footprints.

Another focus of the couple and designers was to build a modern home that didn’t look out of place in town. For all its modern angles and white walls, the home belongs in Canmore.

“We still wanted to keep the integrity of a mountain home,” says Pressman. What they didn’t want was the “overdone” clichés that have become inseparable with the mountain home look — the antler chandelier, the mounted trophy head and the knotty pine floors and cabinets.

Pine, effectively, has been banned from the home. In its place reside hemlock doors done in a classic shaker style, fir baseboards and window casings cut vertically to expose a tighter grain and an alder front door. The home’s cabinetry is all black walnut, a wood often associated with the mid-century modern design style. Look up in the vaulted great room and in the downstairs living room to find cedar ceilings that look more aged than the inside of a sauna.

“We flipped it around to the rough side of the cedar, to make it more rustic,” says Corbett.

The wood also helped bring the scale of the high ceilings down so the low-profile furniture that is a hallmark of mid-century modern style wouldn’t be swallowed up in the space. Natural materials throughout anchor the rooms, as does the sunshine pouring in through large windows on three sides, depending on the time of day.

“I just love it. I am so in love with this place,” says Tustanoff, seated now on a beige lounger in the great room as the afternoon winds down. “This is our essence in here, for sure,” says Pressman.

Downstairs, Rudy slumbers on a floor pillow in the living room. It’s utterly quiet and peaceful. The sun no longer illuminates the great room, but it’s still warm and welcoming inside this modern mountain home.