In Teton County, a striking, modern house boldly blends in

Locals call the stretch of Wyoming Highway 390 between Wilson and Teton Village the Windy Mile.

Along the straightaway, winter winds rake open roadside fields, creating ground blizzards, whiteouts and monumental snowdrifts. In 2017, gusts coming off the Teton Range toppled 17 steel transmission poles, shutting down skiing at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort and activities at Teton Village for almost a week.

Overlooking this blustery territory is the latest iteration of notable Jackson architecture, appropriately named Drift House, with views of the Tetons, Sheep Mountain and more.

In a region known for log cabins and Yellowstone “parkitecture” lodges, it took a while for modern architecture and buildings like Drift House to find their purchase, despite first scuffing a toehold as early as 1938.

Now Drift House, a creation of Jeanne Gang’s Studio Gang for the Laura Sims Davis family, stands as the latest apostle of the cause.

White and sculpted with hardly a straight line visible, Drift House approximates a snow bank carved by prevailing forces, sastrugi fluted by a perpetual but invisible presence. Located a half mile from the highway, its distinctive, curved profile peeks from behind nascent aspens.

Gang’s projects draw notice and awards across the country and around the globe. Her designs promote progressive concepts for community living spaces, social engagement and environmental resiliency.

Drift House attracts some attention, as one might expect a distant, mysterious shape created by a renowned architect would.

“Absolutely gorgeous,” one observer said of Drift House. “It looks like it landed from space,” was another take.

Others are less fascinated.

“To be honest, it’s the traffic that affects me more,” said Dave Miller, a four-decade ski guide and real estate agent who drives by Drift House regularly. “It’s so far back there I really don’t see it.”

From cabin to castle

Shelter in the Jackson Hole and Yellowstone region evolved from wikiups to tepees to wall tents — upgraded with floors, real doors, false western fronts and covered boardwalks. Straight-growing lodgepole pine then made the log cabin ubiquitous.

In the 1930s, a New York family scuffed modern architecture’s first toehold in Jackson Hole. Stanley and Helen Resor, big-league East Coast “publicists and art collectors,” broke from the usual with the purchase of their sprawling ranch along the Snake River.

Helen Resor was riding around the ranch one day and observed that the view of the mountains looked much better from atop a horse, Jackson architect John Carney said. The story, Carney said, is that she wanted a dining pavilion and decided to build it “elevated above this stream.”

Helen Resor served on the board of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she learned of the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a modernist in the Bauhaus school. The aesthetic employed geometric shapes constructed with concrete and steel. The Nazi regime, which promoted designs echoing Greek and Roman classicism, suppressed Bauhaus architects, dooming independent spirits like van der Rohe.

He couldn’t leave Germany without the promise of a job, so in the late 1930s, Helen Resor gave him one.

After a fumbled start — at least one other architect worked on the Resor House before van der Rohe took over — the dining pavilion inched toward completion. It was designed to be rectangular, sitting on concrete piers or buttresses with walls that were almost all glass.

It was, Carney said, the only building in which van der Rohe, “a steel-and-concrete guy,” called for using wood.

The “stream” it spanned was a flow in the Snake River floodplain. The layout was “a little impractical,” Carney said. To get food to the kitchen, he said, cooks and servers had to either go through the dining area or, to avoid guests and entertainment in the single, main room, “cross the river.”

The pavilion’s shape was so geometric it conjures images of diners perched on the last four inches of a straight-backed chair, like a West Point plebe. “You really wanted to sit up straight,” Carney said.

What happened to the Resor House is a bit mysterious.

“There’s a lot of debate,” Carney said. “Nobody can say for a fact that the Mies van der Rohe [pavilion] got fully built.”

That “stream” proved to be something more than a decoration. In 1941, the Snake River, perhaps boosted by releases from Jackson Lake Dam, ran wild and undercut part of the concrete buttresses.

Today only concrete remnants remain. The Resor House exists only as a model in the Museum of Modern Art, in diagrams, drawings and artists’ recreated visualizations.

Architecture and van der Rohe buffs will gather at the Jackson Hole History Museum on Oct. 7 to celebrate the pioneering spirit of Helen Resor and van der Rohe. The architect’s grandson is expected to attend and drawings for the Resor House will be part of the reception and discussion.

A long break

Subdued by the Snake River, modern architecture took a decades-long pause in the area and didn’t reemerge publicly until the 1990s. That’s when the Teton County Library Board engaged Will Bruder, an Arizona architect who had designed several libraries in the southwest, to construct its new building.

Bruder recognized the community’s ties to the log cabin Old West, a theme Jackson leaders and business owners seek to preserve as a tourism draw. He wanted to incorporate log construction and native materials in his design, which was too modern for some folk.

The library plan featured a flat, sloped roof and lots of narrow slits for windows to protect books from their arch enemy — direct sunlight. Nevertheless, glass abounds and indirect light helps illuminate the facility’s open layout.

“People are really freaked out about anything that’s new,” said Ed Riddell, whose wife, Lee, served on the library board at the time.

The couple put Bruder up at their own home when he would come to Jackson to work on the library and decided to commission him to design an office building for their Riddell Advertising and Design business. “We just loved his work, his energy,” Ed Riddell said.

At that time, new materials and construction techniques allowed builders to create different forms. People weary of wintering like hunched-over rodents wanted 10-foot ceilings and more light. Log cabins, “they’re dark,” Riddell said.

The Riddell building almost unshackled Bruder from the constraints of public officials, yet the Riddell office project still roiled the town.

The building, growing wider and wider above its first floor, cantilevers out as it rises three stories like a muffin overflowing its baking cup. A three-story atrium in the building’s center lets light cascade in. Unconventional horizontal windows run as a strip across its street façade.

If you sit at a work desk, the streetscape disappears and only the surrounding hills are visible through the panoramic glass.

“It scared people,” Riddell said of the design, “and I don’t know why. It’s new.”

The sense in the community — reflected by the town planning commission — was that “it isn’t a house if it doesn’t have a peaked roof,” Riddell said.

The building’s shape was to resemble haystacks on nearby ranches, albeit linear haystacks.

“That’s how he sold it to the planning commission,” Riddell said of Bruder. “The haystacks, they overhang.”

The Riddell couple found nasty messages on the office door. Landscaping trees were vandalized, cut down.

“It was a little scary,” Riddell said. “When you start getting anonymous notes — ‘somebody should burn this down,’ — you get freaked out.”

There’s a lot of contemporary architecture in Jackson today, he said. “Our building was the beginning of that.”

Chicago philanthropist

The Davis family hails from Chicago but has been involved in Jackson Hole for some time. Laura Sims Davis serves on the board of the Grand Teton National Park Foundation, an organization that has aided the national park by raising millions of dollars, according to the organization’s website.

Foundation preservation projects include a $40 million donation that enabled the government to buy the Kelly Parcel, and more than $14 million for the rehabilitation of trails and the visitor plaza at popular Jenny Lake.

In Chicago, Laura Davis is a trustee of the Museum of Contemporary Art and of UChicago Medicine. A civic leader and philanthropist, she holds several degrees from Northwestern University, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Drift House is 9,998 square feet, two square feet below the county maximum for its lot size and location, according to county records. The estimated cost of construction is $16 million and the family will pay $57,052 in affordable housing fees, county permits state. Peak Builders is the construction company.

The five-bedroom, seven-bath residence has a matte gray stainless-steel roof and neutral gray siding of terrazzo and white ash, according to the building permit application.

“We first came to Jackson Hole in 1992 and fell in love with this place,” the family said in a statement, “returning every year since 2000 before becoming homeowners here in 2007.

“With Drift House, we are excited to follow in the footsteps of Helen Resor, who first brought a renowned modern architect to Jackson Hole,” the family said. “In our case, we were thrilled to partner with an all-women architect and interior design team, as well as exclusively showcase women artists throughout the house. We couldn’t be happier with the outcome.”

While Drift House may be strikingly original in Jackson Hole, expressive, expansive and expensive private homes are not. In about the first six months of 2025, the Teton County planning and building department issued 16 permits for houses with estimated construction costs of more than $5 million. The average estimated cost was $9.4 million.

The county is now too swamped to regularly keep track. “Over the past year, our staff have been extremely busy, and our Permit Technician has had to prioritize permit processing and customer service over compiling and publishing the monthly activity reports,” Chris Neubecker, the county’s planning and building director, said in an email.

Real estate agent David Viehman is familiar with properties in the top range, calling some new buildings “statement architecture.

“When you get in that price range you want to make a statement,” he said. Homebuilders seek a project “they can put in Architectural Digest.”

Frame construction, steel beams and glass are de rigueur. “One thing you’re not seeing is log homes,” he said. “Those are gone.”

A rule of thumb is that a house will cost twice the price of the lot it sits on, he said.

“Big lots start at $8 million-$10 million and go up from there,” Viehman said. With construction costs at $2,000 a square foot, an 8,000-square-foot house and property would ding a family $24 million, without furnishings.

“That end of market, it’s actually doing pretty well,” Viehman said. He sees demand but when it comes to supply, “there’s just not a lot out there.

“Naked land is being snatched up and people are finding it to build their dream home,” Viehman said.

Carney, who has designed or been involved with 250 projects in Jackson Hole, said he and Gang, whom he knows, aren’t society or statement architects.

“I like to do community projects that don’t make money,” he said. Beautiful houses for wealthy people help finance those endeavors, he said, and Gang subscribes to that ethos.

To be sure, luxury houses are enjoyed and shared. Carney recalls visiting the home of James Wolfensohn, the late president of the World Bank, who commissioned Cesar Pelli to build a stunning log house near the Snake River.

Carney was invited to then-president Bill Clinton’s birthday party at the Wolfensohn home — known as the Snake River House — in 1995.

All the beautiful people were there.

“Al Simpson telling jokes, Queen Noor, Harrison Ford, Lloyd Bentsen, Chelsea, Hillary …” Carney said.

Carney played Wolfensohn’s 9-foot concert grand piano while the rest partied and sang. The financier’s Stradivarius cello sat in a corner.

“It was pretty memorable in a beautiful house,” Carney said, a space that helped create an evening “I’ll never forget.”