Moments of Meditation at a Utah Buddhist's Retreat

A week after viewing one of Imbue Design’s jobs in Salt Lake City, the mind of a neighborhood nonprofit that develops low-income home hired the company — composed of Christopher Talvy, Hunter Gundersen and Matt Swindel — to design a escape for her on a dramatic site between Capitol Reef and Boulder Mountain. In addition to running her business, she’s a practicing Buddhist of the Tibetan sect, and her escape consists of a residence (completed) and also a studio (under construction). We are going to have a tour of the house and see how the architects produced a place that, as they put it, “spiritualizes the everyday activities of living.”

in a Glance
Who lives here: A practicing Buddhist with two Chihuahuas
Location: Wayne County, Utah
Size: 1,350 square feet
That’s interesting: 1 leg of the Y-shaped residence is built of gabions, rock-filled cable baskets typically used for retaining walls.

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1 component that makes the house interesting is the use of gabions for exterior walls. Gabions are wire baskets that are filled with stones, broken concrete, and/or gravel; they’re often used as retaining walls. When used in buildings, gabion walls give the impression that a building rises out of the land in the event of the Buddhist retreat, the stones filling the baskets were actually gathered from the property, together with gravel from neighboring.

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It’s simple to see why rooting the building to its place would make sense in this part of Utah. The instant site (about 7,000 feet above sea level) has a steep drop and distant views under the expansive sky. “Tying the job to its environment and figuratively,” as the architects describe it, enables the house to be a place of calm and stability in the circumstance of desert, mountains and lots of juniper trees.

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In design the house resembles a lowercase “Y,” with the bar covered in gabions intersecting at an angle using a two-story volume covered in standing-seam metal panels. These volumes relate to the living area and the bedrooms. Here we see them flaring off to capture perspectives to the east (living area) and north (bedroom).

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The glass expanses on the endings and the mostly good end walls are highlighted in this photo taken at dusk.

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About half of those long rectangular strategy defined from the gabions is exterior storage, tucked under the roof as it merges with the rocky website. The gabion walls’ “growing” in the website really comes around in this view toward the exterior storage. An introduction on the other side (toward the view from the first photograph) enables passage below this part of the building.

Notice the railings atop the gabion walls; more on this shortly.

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It is worth pointing out a couple of things about gabions: The stones will need to be larger than the grid of the basket (the mesh in the base enables a stronger base with gravel), and gabions aren’t a weather-tight construction, provided the distances between the stones.

Imbue Design used the gabions as a facing in front of a good wall but use the stones’ ability to absorb heat during the day and radiate it at night, making a means of passive heating appropriate to the place.

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Another very interesting feature of the escape is the way that it’s almost undetectable on strategy. Here’s a view in the driveway, where some boulders keep cars off the roof of the gabion-covered volume. As the architects describe the strategy: “The layout grows from the website. When you arrive in the job, you are introduced into some 93-foot-long deck made from resilient ipe wood.”

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They add that “93 feet later, you find yourself perched on top of the architecture using a mind-blowing 360-degree view of Capitol Reef, Grover Valley and Boulder Mountain.”

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From the roof, access into the house proper is through a stair that brings you to the outside distance between the gabion walls found before.

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Front door is aligned using the stair. From here we can observe the 3 materials that make up the house’s exterior: metal panels, gabions and wood. We can even see how the gabions and wood cladding work together to make a thicker wall meeting.

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The entry aligns with the large window that faces east, so immediately one is reminded of the surroundings, even if indoors. The glass wall that we saw near the beginning slides open to connect inside and outside. The floor, walls and ceiling extend past the sliding glass wall to make a tiny outdoor zone and help in shading the living room.

Access to the principal bedroom, which angles on the short leg of the lowercase “Y,” can be seen at left.

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Turning 180 degrees, we are now looking toward the entry (frosted-glass door on the right) and the open kitchen. The spiral stair leads into the roof and the home office on the second floor.

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The windows that are cut into the side walls are selective and suited to the interior. In the previous photograph we saw the low window above the kitchen counter and stove, and here the dining table and window function together (it is as if the table dropped from the wall, like an ironing board) to frame a view perpendicular to the large view through the sliding glass door.

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Here we’re in the primary bedroom, looking toward the living area (opening left) and master bath (hallway at appropriate). We finally meet the owner’s two Chihuahuas, which the architects considered in the layout: Notice the low windows on the way into the toilet. (Yes, even the windows might also serve to ventilate the distances, but I like the notion of their giving the dogs their particular view outside)

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Our last view of the house is in the second-floor home office and its view to the north west.

While the soon-to-be-completed separate studio will be more basic than the house concerning amenities (as it’ll be geared toward enriching meditation), the house’s orientation, terraces and simplicity offer exactly what the architects describe as “moments for meditation.” A calmness and sense of belonging are evident with the house inside and outside.

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