By Helen Thompson

	Click for more images Architect: Trout Architects/Chartered Builder: Trout Architects/Chartered Straw bale construction: Jacober Brothers Construction

Is architecture destiny? Steve Trout and Sally Stevens may have mulled over the question after they met six years ago. Sally, a graphic designer, was living and working in a Victorian house near downtown Boise. On her first date with Steve, an architect, she remarked, “You know, I would really like to buy a skinny little lot up in the foothills.” Steve ushered Sally into his car and drove her to the foothills, stopping in front of a skinny little lot he had purchased two years before. “Well,” he said, “here’s your lot.”

The rest, as they say, is history: Sally and Steve are now married and live on the slender lot in a house Steve was designing when the two met. But long before the wedding day, Steve modified the design for the house that would fit on the trapezoidal piece of land. In the husband-and-wife version, there would be a studio where Sally could conduct her design business.

The three-story glass, stucco, rough cedar, and metal dwelling hugs the hillside; a separate office over the garage precedes the main house. From there, a flight of stairs offers options: To its immediate right are a patio and pond that front two guest rooms, and farther up the stairs are the entrance and living areas. On the top floor—accessible via interior stairs—is a master suite with a bird’s-eye view southeast to a park, Table Rock and Castle Rock plateaus, the desert beyond, and the city. “It makes us feel like we have so much room to breathe,” says Sally.

Four stories tall (counting the garage level), the 2,800-square-foot house rises above it all. “The shape of the house emerged from the site,” says Steve. Because the lot is steep (vertical height increases by 45 feet from bottom to top), it had been considered undevelopable, and remained a rare vacant lot in a neighborhood pretty much fully developed in the 1970s.

The sole option was to build upward, which allowed Steve flexibility to experiment. “I wanted to work with spaces and volumes in an economical way,” he explains. By stacking each living space on top of another, the architect freed rooms from the necessity for doors and space-wasting halls. But he admits to also indulging a childhood dream: “I always had this fantasy about living above the treetops.”

Because the established contemporary house figures so prominently in the neighborhood, Steve sought, and deftly achieved, harmony by topping the structure with a pitched roof, similar to others nearby. Building materials—such as the metal siding that clads one side of the structure, and lots of glass—are a friendly nod to styles popular 30 years ago (the picture windows, for example, that punctuate the facades of most of the subdivision’s houses).

“The site made the house a certain shape,” explains Steve, “but the view twisted it.” As if excising shapes from a box, Steve carved space from each floor to focus on the vistas. “These are like release points that throw open the view,” he explains. The effect on Sally was dramatic. “The first night we spent here,” she says, “I almost had vertigo. Now, though, I love it.”

With the wild blue yonder, mountains, desert, and city on one side of the glass, interiors on the other side are less complex. Sally came to the marriage with a household of furniture, which she gave away. Steve had a few mid-century pieces from his father (also an architect), such as a slate-top chrome side table designed by the elder Trout’s high school friend and renowned furniture designer, Hugh Acton. “Our method,” says Sally, “is to search on eBay, scrounge around to find a piece, or make it. It’s made our house a lot more interesting.”

Following her own advice, the homeowner bought high-quality muslin, which she sewed into diaphanous curtains for the large window walls in the house and in her office. Her efforts weren’t confined to delicate fabrics, though. After acquiring the end piece of a red fir pier, Sally planed and sanded the massive chunk, gouging out the surface with a woodworking tool before sealing it with urethane. “We needed a coffee table,” she said, “but it had to be used as seating, and be a surface our grandkids could jump on.”

From coffee table to stairwell placement to roof pitch, much thought and plain old elbow grease has gone into the Trout-Stevens residence. “Every time we met a design problem, we came up with good solutions,” recalls Sally. “We had a ball building this house.”