The great room’s abundant windows draw the outside world into the home’s living space. Here, the flat top of a distant mesa rises beyond the sheer canyon that hems in the home’s lot. Inside, fir ceiling trusses inspired the heavy fir couches, and a dark-colored concrete floor adds warmth.
Architecture & Interior Design
Design Harmony
With its rustic face, sleek soul and secluded setting, this Telluride home merges cliffside drama with modern elegance


The kitchen’s expansive concrete island is softened by its mottled finish. The sculpted barstools—also custom pieces—are made from Baltic birch. The gentle curve of the outside-facing cabinets and counters continue the theme of swooping lines seen throughout the home and in its furniture. The kitchen is designed for two people to work side by side comfortably while taking in views of Telluride’s majestic peaks in the distance.


Canyon Point encompasses vast stretches of outside living space. This sweeping patio, looking back into the great room, contains elevated flat rocks for sitting.

Like ghosts in a lonely meadow, the rock walls appeared to architect Jack Snow as he strolled near the canyon’s edge. They seemed perfect: long swaths of tumbled stone, slashing through that empty land above Telluride, perhaps the relics of an old farm. Though they were the mere concoction of Snow’s inventive mind, those imaginary stones gave Snow, of RKD Architects in Vail, the genesis for what would become an artistic residential masterpiece. “The walls,” Snow says, “that’s the first thing that settled into my brain and stayed there as an organizing concept.”

The home grew on and around these once-imaginary walls. Dubbed “Canyon Point,” the home is a six-bedroom, seven-and-a-half-bath balance of modern lines and high-country textures, surrounded by a cozy oasis of patios, fire pit and pond. Canyon Point, designed by Snow for a Telluride couple, not only absorbed the natural colors and materials of its high perch, but also became part of the breath-grabbing scenery, 1,500 feet above the floor of the San Miguel River Canyon.

To read about how each architectural element, rooted in the craggy scenery, flowed into the next design feature as Canyon Point took shape, pick up a copy of the August issue of CH&L (and you won’t want to miss the story on the distinctive custom furniture Snow designed for the home’s interiors).