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"View Slideshow\n\nIn the winter of 2001, Karen Warshaw, an antiques dealer from New York, and her husband, Peter, who is retired, flew to Wyoming, for a ski vacation in Jackson Hole. The slopes happened to be a little bare that season, and the Warshaws ended up pursuing another favorite American pastime\u2014real estate hunting. Somewhat less typically, they came across their dream property in less than two hours.\n\n\"You're 7,000 feet up, and you have a 360-degree view,\" Karen Warshaw says of the five-acre ridgetop site the couple ultimately acquired. \"Most of that is the Tetons, which we think are among the most beautiful mountains in the world. South is Jackson, east is the Sleeping Indian Mountain, and you can also see the elk refuge in Jackson Hole.\"\n\nArriving at their dream house took a little more time. The Warshaws knew that whomever they hired to design it had to be well versed in both Jackson Hole's strict building codes and its harsh weather conditions, so they limited their search to local architects. They also knew that, in terms of style, they wanted to get as far away from their conventional New York existence as possible (their English country-style house in Westchester County was decorated by the eminently traditional Mark Hampton). But they didn't want a look that was predictably western. \"I think what they call western architecture is what people who've seen a lot of western movies imagine houses are supposed to look like,\" says Karen Warshaw. \"There are so many materials besides logs.\"\n\nIt's a safe bet that no western movie has featured residential design of the sort conceived for the Warshaws by Jackson-based architect Tom Ward. In lieu of logs, for instance, there are flat expanses of concrete, glass and wood. Instead of a looming lodge or a rambling ranch house, the residence takes the unassuming form of a sequence of rectilinear volumes stepping down its hillside site. Their canopies are not heavy-timbered A-frames but flat roofs planted with wildflower sod. There's no wicker-filled rear porch\u2014just a series of concrete decks ringed by a meandering channel of water.\n\n\"We pretty much set the homeowners' association on fire,\" Ward recalls. \"Then one of the residents said, There's a giant clause in our covenant that says the architecture should reflect the intrinsic values of the site\u2014and this house does that in spades.' \"\n\nThe house's slope-hugging profile, winged and sod-covered roofs and rock-colored concrete planes all honor its spectacular location. The site's most conspicuous intrinsic value is its views, and Ward's stepped design fully exploits the vistas while conforming to the homeowners' association's 22-foot height restriction.\n\nOne enters the residence roughly at midlevel, where a view of the Grand Teton explodes through a window on the other side of the house. The master bedroom and guest rooms look out on the mountains both from inside and from their respective decks, and the living, dining and kitchen areas upstairs enjoy the head-spinning panorama that originally seduced the Warshaws. (The kitchen cabinets were placed below counter level to preserve the views.)\n\nEven the water serves to pull in the outdoors, mirroring the mountains and the sky and casting light reflections inside the house. \"Because of the lack of tree cover, it's really quite arid here,\" explains Ward. \"We thought a water feature would be a relief.\" From a long stainless-steel trough on the deck off the living room, the water sheets into a channel surrounding the master bedroom deck, flows into a reflecting pool at the entrance level, streams past the guest rooms and settles into a small infinity-edge pool at the lowest level of the house. The residence was designed to deflect other climatic vagaries as well: Ward set it at a 20-degree angle to the butte's prevailing winds to offset fierce gusts, and he covered the decks with steel trellises that provide protection from the summer sun.\n\nBut inside and out, this is a house that embraces nature rather than turning its back on it. The whole point of the interiors, Karen Warshaw says, was \"not to compete with the outdoors. The best art was coming through the windows.\" Working with interior designer Alessandra Gouldner, she borrowed the palette\u2014beiges, rusts, steel blues\u2014from the immediate environment. A table designed by Ward made of 55-million-year-old Wyoming fossil stone greets visitors in the entrance, and paintings and pottery by local artists are displayed throughout. The furniture is modern but, as Ward would say, \"dirty modern,\" or organic. There are as many curved lines as straight ones, and everything is clad in comfortable fabrics that stand up to family use.\n\nIt's not just the house that celebrates nature. The Warshaws are the parents of grown triplets\u2014two girls and a boy\u2014and the place serves as a base camp for alpine sports. \"They're huge skiers and hikers,\" says Karen Warshaw. \"Our friends come out from New York. We go fishing and play golf. It's really just heaven.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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