TRADITIONAL KUDOS Bigger isn’t always better, or as Traditional Home recently put it about a featured JLF Architects project, “Living large isn’t always a good thing.” The national magazine writes in its summer 2023 issue about a Park City house that the owner described – before the JLF renovation – as “a log cabin on steroids,” adding, “We had the courage to buy a house we didn’t like and turn it into a home we love.” The homeowners turned to the JLF/Big-D Signature team for a “right-sizing mission” that “touched almost everything except the home’s roofline and original footprint.” More JLF work currently on newsstands: Mountain Living’s “Guesthouse” story on a clever fool-the-eye addition to a client’s existing house and a Western Art & Architecture-featured house that backs up to Jackson Hole’s legendary slopes yet beautifully defers to its mountain landscape. Finally, JLF just re-launched its jlfarchitects.com website with a gorgeous update, heavy on the eye candy. Check it out!

SMALL BLESSINGS A charming Jackson hole guesthouse by WRJ Design with Northworks Architects doubles down on the “right-sizing” message with clever planning that allows the home’s new mini-me to live large at a mere 1,000 square feet – earning 10 pages in Cottage Journal’s special-edition Cottage Retreats issue, on newsstands through October. The homeowners presented WRJ with an extra challenge, wanting both a comfortable abode for visiting family and friends and a house to live in during the planned construction of their new main house, explains WRJ cofounder and creative director Rush Jenkins. As Jenkins tells the magazine, WRJ used lighting “like jewelry” and carefully selected antique and one-of-a-kind pieces (the open-plan kitchen centers around an expansive live-edge table made by a local craftsman) “to bridge the gap between the natural and the new” in a dreamy escape where, as the Cottage Retreats cover line puts it, “Small Space Meets Big Style in Jackson, Wyoming.”

DESIGNING MEN Western Home Journal convened a designer round table this summer, inviting Kibler & Kirch’s Jeremiah Young (third from left) to weigh in as one of five top Western designers – as well as WRJ Design’s Rush Jenkins and Klaus Baer (at right)! “In a profession dominated by women, a set of men stand out as leading interior designers in the American West,” WHJ writes, introducing readers to the fab five “whose influences are rooted in the West but who have made impacts coast to coast.” Sharing his take on Western design with the group, Young says, “There is a design brand of the West and the brand hasn’t developed in a vacuum. It’s eclectic. It begins with what is found in nature—stone, soil, timber, water, animals. Native Americans were using these elements as the first purveyors of Western design,” with influences added from European and American settlers, he continues, plus “those from Hollywood and the mythos of the West ... Now we’re adding the best bits of contemporary art and architecture.”