Written by Kathleen Hackett • Photographed by Miguel Flores-Vianna • Produced By Anita Sarsidi
The Sawtooth Mountains cut a jagged swath across the high blue western sky above Ketchum, Idaho. The American Alps, as they are ambitiously called, cradle more than 300 pristine lakes in their glacier basins. This is Hemingway country—Papa spent the last years of his peripatetic life here—a place he loved for its rugged authenticity and the myriad streams running through it. The beauty of these majestic mountains (not to mention the world-class skiing) has been luring Rusty and Mary Lynn Turner and their three children here from their native Newport Beach, California, for more than a quarter century. But it was only three years ago that the couple decided to build their ideal family retreat, one that Mary Lynn, an interior designer, insisted appear as if it had been there all along. “I always wanted to do something rustic,” she says, “but I didn’t want a luxury log home or a modern ski chalet. I wanted a house that looked like we had rescued it, like we brought it back to life.”
Mary Lynn had the perfect partners to see her vision through: her daughters Marie and Emily. With a master’s degree in fine and decorative arts from Christie’s Education in London and a stint with the internationally renowned David Collins Studio in London under her belt, Marie had some serious design chops. Meanwhile, the accounting skills Emily learned at the London School of Economics kept the numbers end of the business in the family. The trio formed M. Elle Design and took themselves on as their first clients. “My mother and I finish each other’s sentences,” says Marie, “and we have become excellent editors of each other’s ideas.”
Indeed, during her European foray, Marie’s frequent trips to France kindled a love of the Old World barns that dot the countryside. For years before that, however, Mary Lynn had been filing away pictures of stone farmhouses snapped on repeated visits to Provence that she knew she would one day draw inspiration from. “For much of my career, I did interiors that define Southern California style,” says Mary Lynn. “Meanwhile, I was always dreaming about barns.” Together, mother and daughters came up with a scheme to achieve the timeworn yet timeless aesthetic they were after. They adopted the compound approach that marks rural farms, where several buildings, each intended for a specific use, make up the homestead. They worked with architect Bob White of Laguna Beach–based ForestStudio to design a collection of five structures, each clad in a different rough-hewn material and all of which look like they rightfully belong nestled between the mighty Sawtooths and the Big Wood River.
The assemblage began, of course, with a real barn, a 1,000-square-foot great room sided in reclaimed wood that stands at the center of the compound. Windows stretch from the floor to the eaves. “So many mountain homes are dark,” says Mary Lynn, “and a barn, traditionally, is too. I didn’t want the overscale windows to distract from the design, but I did want to take advantage of the endless sunny days here. We created rather elaborate draperies to control just how much light we want to let in.” From there the Turners turned their attention to the limestone house, an equally spacious two stories accommodating a kitchen, the family room, and the master bedroom. A dormered cottage holds the game room and guest quarters, while a mudroom and ultrachic bunk room are installed in the white clapboard farmhouse that branches off from the main residence. “My mother has visions of lots of grandchildren running around here one day,” says Marie of her family-oriented parents, “but for now it’s pretty much filled with 20-somethings!” Steel-and-glass pass-throughs, roofed in lead-coated copper to effect the patina of zinc, connect the outbuildings to the soaring pitched-roof barn, their ceilings intentionally low slung to dramatize the contrast in scale.
Such meticulous attention to materials doesn’t end at the front door. Limestone, reclaimed oak, steel, and wood planks show up throughout the interiors, striking an elegant rusticity. For the fireplace in the great room, for instance, the Turners chose a textured limestone casing. They hand-selected the beams from an old Wisconsin dairy barn, then determined where each would be placed before a single nail was driven. “We didn’t want any of them to look too beat up,” says Marie, “or the space would begin to look like a cliché.” Indeed, Mary Lynn insisted that the decor not be “too cowboy,” though they managed to incorporate stacks of birch logs, hefty blankets, and even an antler or two into the scheme. Nor did they want the furnishings to compete with the gorgeous shell. There’s not a shred of silk or brocade in sight. “We went for linen and wool in neutral shades. They’re calming and luxurious in the same way that nature is,” says Marie.
With two of her children engaged to be married this year, one could assume that, in the farmstead tradition, the Turners would be planning an expansion. In fact, Mary Lynn admits she dreams of yet another building for the property. “I’d like to add a stone guest house,” she confides, “but every time I mention it, my husband just rolls his eyes.”
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