$5 million 'trailers'

Award-winning Aspen architect takes the mobile-home concept to new heights

Betsy Lehndorff, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 27, 2007 at midnight

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ASPEN - One of the first things Scott Lindenau heard from a neighbor while building his $10 million project was that the side-by-side houses looked like two-story double-wide mobile homes.

"His taste was so remotely different from ours," the 50-year-old Aspen architect says, recalling the remark. "I said 'thank you' because everyone doesn't like the same thing."

The mobile-home theme is one of Lindenau's favorites. In 2001, he got a lot of attention when he built his family's home in an Aspen trailer court for $300,000. Back then it was hard to find a home in Glitter Gulch for under a million dollars, but his home won a slew of awards and brought him new clients.

Lindenau, trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, has a goal of creating architecture that challenges passersby.

"We enjoy working with clients who want to go on a journey of discovery," says Lindenau, of Studio B, in Aspen. "When we start out, we don't know what we are going to arrive at. It's a very involved and rigorous design process."

The financial backer of his latest project, Swedish businessman Theodor Dalenson, 47, CEO of Pergo floors, and his wife, Isabella, fell in love with one of the homes. They offered to buy it as a second residence before construction was done. A luxury-vacation club bought the other home.

Blocks of Italian marble weighing 250 pounds each provide a crisp, polished foundation for the buildings. The plantation-grown mahogany siding is fitted together like fine furniture. Double-insulated windows from Canada dot these walls at varying levels and wrap some corners of the houses.

The one-car garages for each home are equally exotic, built of mahogany, marble and zinc. The Dalensons' is a free-standing box tucked under their second-story bedroom.

Lindenau says the Dalensons' home complements the one next door (he dubbed the two-home project "NOVE/Sibling Rivalry"). "The goal was to design two houses that spoke to each other and then carry the attention to detail throughout, all the way down to the doorknobs."

From inside, the homes seem to square off against each other, circling warily around a central courtyard. But windows are offset so that one owner can't stare into the living room of the other.

Spec homes are a new venture for Lindenau, who builds only a few a year. The odds are in his favor: A home in Aspen can appreciate as much as $1 million a year.

Although they love the views of Aspen Mountain out the bedroom window, the Dalensons need lots of wall space for their favorite hobby: collecting art.

"For a while we almost decided on a house without windows," Dalenson says in an interview at his home.

A knock on the door reveals why. A package has arrived, a skinny 8-by-10-foot crate. While their three children watch videos in a basement retreat, Theodor and Isabella excuse themselves and trot to the garage. Isabella picks up a cordless drill and removes dozens of screws from the crate and the two lift the lid away. Inside is a paper-wrapped panel, which they gingerly inch through their home's back door.

Once in the kitchen, they strip away the rest of the packaging, and the exuberant colors of a Robert Rauschenberg painting bounce off their kitchen's white surfaces.

"Now all we have to do is hire somebody to hang it on the wall," Isabella, 40, says of the multimillion-dollar painting.

With their passion for art, the couple wanted equally daring architecture but a simple interior. White plastered walls were a perfect choice. The hue also ties in to the look of the polished marble on the exterior.

"We always had white in Sweden," Isabella says. "A few times we tried to paint color on the walls - it didn't work. We immediately repainted them white."

Through her interior designer, Isabella also kept interior furnishings neutral. Paintings and piles of books on their favorite artists throw color everywhere.

In architecture as well as art, "it doesn't matter what other people say," Theodor says.

"You are allowed to have an opinion, and nothing is right or wrong. There is nothing absolute about it."

It all adds up

NOVE/Sibling Rivalry is full of details, none of them inexpensive:

• $600 for each 2-inch-thick, 250-pound block of polished white marble from Italy

• $50,000 for the glossy white laminated kitchen cabinets by Eggersmann of Germany. Countertops are white marble.

• $20,000 for the floating steel- framed staircase with glass railings and mahogany treads

• $20 a square foot for the Austrian- made, engineered wood flooring recommended for heated floors

• $6 million is the value of the Dalenson home today.

• $2 million is the approximate cost of the Frank Stella painting on the wall above the kitchen.

Other details

Name: NOVE is Latin slang for "new and fresh."

Size: Each home is 20 feet wide, 70 feet long and 21 feet high.

Energy conservation: The 3,700-square-foot units are built with some sustainable materials and are energy-efficient.

Integral white Venetian plaster: This material covers all the interior walls and costs three times as much as conventional drywall. Men on scaffolds worked two weeks to plaster the walls of each house. "The thing about the plaster is, you don't really know what it looks like until it dries a week later," architect Scott Lindenau says. "When it's done it's done, and you can't just paint over it."

Doors: Built locally, the front doors are made of mahogany and designed to pivot; they aren't attached to the frame with hinges. Interior doors are also made of mahogany.

Hardware:Lindenau installed brushed-aluminum door handles by FFB.

Furniture in the Dalensons' house: Isabella Dalenson's interior designer selected pieces from a French manufacturer.

Lighting: Museum-quality Erco track lighting was inset into the Dalensons' ceilings, creating a geometric shadow line.

lehndorffb@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2792.

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