Creede, in its long and storied history, has experienced no dearth of colorful residents. The last and most enduring of Colorado's silver- mining camps had been populated with ranchers and homesteaders (and originally known as Jimtown, before Jimtown, in true Old West fashion, simply appropriated a neighboring settlement's name), when a high-grade silver vein was discovered in Willow Creek Canyon in 1890. Seemingly overnight, slab cities and tent villages were erected, the Holy Moses mine was up and running, and Creede's freewheeling, improvisational style, as well as its appeal to those on the more vivid end of the personality spectrum, was established.
While recent transplant Bryan Anderson may have little in common with Bat Masterson, Soapy Smith or any of the other characters who called the Rocky Mountain boomtown home, his business card describes him as "amateur architect, apprentice carpenter, journeyman designer, master of nonlinear thought." Another local, the building inspector in charge of approving the concrete footings on what would become Anderson's singular contribution to the regional architecture, had to go defend his world-champion title in tomahawk throwing just at the time the pour was scheduled. "I know your work, I'll vouch for you," he told Anderson as he dashed out of town. The Creede spirit, it would appear, is alive and well.
Anderson was commissioned by Julie Augur to rebuild a small barn, essentially a dilapidated garage, which was part of a compound of seven structures, including an old miner's cabin, she acquired in the heart of Creede. Augur, who lives in Aspen, had spent childhood summers fly-fishing with her father on the Rio Grande—Creede sits at its headwaters—and wanted to create a retreat for her family. The only programmatic requirement she had for the replacement building was that it provide storage for a 16-foot mahogany drift boat handcrafted by her son—and ("Oh, little did I realize," she says, laughing) that it be interesting.
Augur knew that Anderson had never designed or built a full-fledged house. He had worked in Kansas for decades in different areas of construction, mostly historic preservation of Victorians, and had a side business building detailed 1:12-scale miniatures from historical blueprints. What she could not have known is that her new boathouse-cum-guesthouse—all 800 square feet of it—would take six years to complete ("Bryan," she says dryly, "has a different sense of time from the rest of us"), and, though the process always promised to be something of an adventure, virtually every aspect of the fantastical design would come as a surprise to her.
"In the beginning, when Bryan asked if I was familiar with Norwegian stave churches, I said no, but go for it," Augur says. "I cared only about the quality of his woodworking and never expected to fully understand what he was doing." Anderson acknowledges that it was "an unheard-of opportunity to have total control over a project—to be allowed to run wild with the place." His selection of a folk religious design as a loose theme seems apt, in that he now proposes Augur for sainthood "for having such crazy faith in me."
Stave churches were initially built in Norway in the early 11th century as the country converted from paganism to Christianity. In keeping with the Viking tradition of boatbuilding, they were highly ornamental, richly carved structures with motifs steeped in symbolism. Structural variations evolved; common to all were staves (corner posts) and timber frames. Anderson makes clear that this is "in no way a legitimate replica" of the style. His main "church" space is the boat shelter and a small sitting room; the "choir loft" is a bed-room and bath; and an apse, which pushes out the rear elevation, is a work area.
Norwegian on both sides of his family, Anderson says that his attraction to wood is genetic and that stave churches have been "cooking in my head forever. The most outrageous one, Fantoft, in Bergen, took my breath away the first time I saw it." Stave architecture is largely about an ad hoc flexibility and letting the building go where it will: In some of the earliest examples, four trees served as the corners, setting the plan, and whatever pieces of wood could be utilized determined the design. In that vein, Anderson drew floor plans but mapped out little of the interior finish work in advance. "Changes and additions and the occasional wild-hare idea," is how he describes his process. "No blueprints."
Nearly every part of the 20-by-20-foot building contains some instance of stunning craftsmanship. A "choir screen" dividing the upper floor is a fretwork tour de force with Victorian, Art Nouveau, Viking, Celtic and even Maori (spirals near the top) elements. The banister is a carved branch of bristlecone pine that Anderson found in the woods when he went searching for a piece that curved like a hanging rope. Fashioned as a scaled dragon, the ridge- board defines the exterior: Dragon heads as protective roof corners are typical of stave churches; Anderson's version—one dragon head in the center with wings on the side and a tail on the back—was inspired as much by his travels to China.
Resolving Augur's sole instruction to accommodate the trailered boat, the builder hinged one whole section of the front wall, including the window, doorframe and corner trim; it closes through gravity, involving a swinging cast-iron window weight. "It was an engineering challenge," he says. "I wasn't about to compromise the look by putting in a garage door." Roof ventilation in the cross-gabled structure was another "head-scratcher." There are no eaves between the rafters in which to place louvers —and Anderson did not want any "breathing" at the peak to be, again, visually obtrusive. His solution was to install soffits and drill horizontally so that there would be direct airflow both above and below the roof; the three layers of curved fascias (100-year-old redwood from a nearby water tank) are similarly ventilated.
"This isn't a hippie house but a brilliantly thought-out building," Augur emphasizes. It is situated deep in its yard and, as Anderson notes, "blends in with Creede in spite of its radical design"—primarily because it maintains its original square footprint and is built almost entirely from reclaimed wood. He saved each board from the existing barn/garage and, says Augur, went on to incorporate "literally every other piece of wood he could get his hands on. Honestly, people probably woke up some mornings to find their fences weren't all there."
Anderson doesn't dispute this—indeed, upon completion of the project, he rewarded himself by adding a line at the bottom of his business card. His new title? "Creator of whimsical Viking salvage style."
