Wasatch Mountains, Utah, USA

Summit Horizon Neighborhood – Phase 1 by Brian MacKay-Lyons of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects with interior designers Diana Carl and Sawa Rostkowska for Powder Mountain in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains will be a home base for Summit Series, an ambitious speaker program that attracts a community of innovators and social impact investors from a broad range of fields.

Close your eyes and imagine a neighborhood consisting of modest gable-roofed buildings, perched in the air on stilts, climbing up a steep south-facing mountainside, accessed by 40-foot steel bridge to their upper floors, and densely aggregated around a series of courtyards. 

This memorable architectural vocabulary gives the Horizon Neighborhood a strong ‘Sense of Place.’

Summit Horizon Neighborhood – Phase 1 has recently been awarded a 2022 International Architecture Awards Honorable Mention by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

Summit Horizon is the first pre-designed neighborhood to be built on Powder Mountain. 

It consists of 30 cabins that range in size from 1,000 to 2,500 square feet, a communal structure called the ‘Pioneer Cabin,’ for the use of the homeowners, and a series of strategically placed garages. 

Buyers can choose from among four cabin types, which either follow the contours of the terrain like mountain goats, or are cross-grain forms, projecting off the mountainside, like extreme skiers. 

The cabins are then customized for individual owners. 

This theme and variation strategy, in combination with the dramatic topography, results in a neighborhood that has a powerful sense of both unity and variety.

The Summit Horizon Neighborhood is an architectural expression of the ethos and utopian values of Summit and Powder Mountain: community building, climate responsiveness, and landscape stewardship.

The cabins are aggregated around courtyards in a way that maximizes a sense of both community and privacy. 

The journey from garages to the cabins is choreographed to foster chance meetings and social interaction. 

While passing between units or under bridges, like a game of “Snakes and Ladders,” views of the magnificent surrounding mountain landscape are framed. 

Privacy between the closely-sited homes is maintained by alternating solid walls and generous windows, while minimizing views from social to private spaces within.

The climate response of the design begins with a passive solar orientation, together with the use of a thermal mass of concrete floors and hydronic in-floor heating. 

Diagonally braced steel bases in conjunction with strategically placed shear walls respond to the strong winds that can occur on the mountain. 

In response to the extremely high annual snowfall that gives Powder Mountain its name, cabins are accessed by second floor steel bridges. 

A series of protected courtyards create microclimates in an otherwise open, windswept landscape.

As the buildings step up the steep mountainside, each cabin favors dramatic southwest sunset views through the Ogden Pass to the Great Salt Lake Basin from the living level. 

The steel stilt foundations are intended to make the cabins light on the land. 

Entry bridges exploit the steep site topography to allow easy horizontal access to the upper floors. 

The dense neighborhood plan will ultimately allow the majority of Powder Mountain’s 11,500 acres to remain undeveloped, conserved for future generations.

The material palette of the Summit Horizon Neighborhood is derived from the simple cedar-clad barns in the Eden valley below. 

These simple cabins consist of cedar shingled roofs and vertical shiplap cedar walls. 

Aluminum-clad wood windows and cedar interiors complete the monolithic, sculptural effect named “Heritage Modernism” by the clients. 

The monumental while at the same time modest design stands in contrast to the excessive architecture now typical of resorts in the Mountain West.

Project: Summit Horizon Neighborhood – Phase 1
Architects: MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects Ltd.
Lead Architect: Brian MacKay-Lyons
Project Architects: Duncan Patterson and Jennifer Esposito
Design Team: Reid Joslin, Matt Jones, Ben Fuglevand, Farhan Durrani, Paulette Cameron
Interior Design: Diana Carl and Sawa Rostkowska
General Contractor: Mountain Resort Builders
Client: Powder Mountain
Photographers: Doublespace Photography, Paul Bundy, and Younes Bounhar