As the CEO of Five9, a publicly traded cloud program firm, Rowan Trollope knows a thing or two about technology. Thinking of his job building slicing edge technologies, 1 could possibly feel that his new Lake Tahoe house would seem like some thing out of The Jetsons. But if cartoon analogies are to be created, the 50-calendar year-previous entrepreneur’s home—which capabilities slabs of stone flooring and wooden ceilings—would healthy far more seamlessly into an episode of The Flintstones. “In general, we definitely stayed away from technology in the household,” Trollope admits. Rather, he and his wife Stephanie along with their two younger children (their third is out of the house), sought to develop a room that blurred the line between indoor and outside living. “We wanted our residence to not be on the land, but of it,” Trollope carries on, “which is why it is partly built into a slope in the floor.”
Situated in Truckee, California (about ten miles from Lake Tahoe), the one particular-acre property was acquired by the Trollopes in 2018. By March of 2020, construction was finish, allowing the loved ones to quickly transfer out of their most important San Francisco home and into the house just as the pandemic hit. “The new household became our sanctuary in the course of the pandemic,” Trollope claims. “It has that really feel of becoming very isolated, which I like because my daily everyday living is commonly crammed with men and women, meetings, sound. But this home was designed to be the opposite of that in each and every way.” In get to in shape their utopian vision, Trollope tapped the California-based organization Faulkner Architects. “There is minimal difference in materials deployment inside and out [of the home],” points out the firm’s founder Greg Faulkner. “I preferred to evoke thoughts of a backcountry excursion, the spirit of escape and discovery that rises on arrival of someplace uniquely distinctive. These inner thoughts are critical in connecting with a place.”
If connecting with the room was important, then that intended that locating the ideal inside designer was paramount. Which is why Trollope brought in the San Francisco–based designer Nicole Hollis. The two earlier labored alongside one another on Trollope’s other dwelling, making a genuine friendship in the process. “Not only did we come to be incredibly good friends, but our young ones did, far too,” Hollis claims. “He’s a CEO of a huge enterprise, and I’m an inside designer. We reside in two distinct worlds, but our backgrounds are what seriously bonded us.” Trollope shares, “Nicole and I have a feeling of being self-designed.” He, as Hollis, labored his way up right after not graduating university. “But it wasn’t just our frequent backstory, I quite much have fallen in really like with architecture and inside structure as a result of Nicole’s eye.”
“For any one who methods foot in the residence, they would quickly perception that a great deal of inspiration arrived from Donald Judd,” Hollis claims, referring to the sleek minimalism prevalent throughout the place. But it was apparent the team—and the homeowners—pushed for more than just a Judd-like ambiance. “The home is developed about a central courtyard that is partly lined by a cantilevered roof,” Hollis points out. “Since all 4 home windows encompass the inside courtyard, the fireplace [from the fire pit] illuminates the entire property as if it had been a camping web page.”
As a great deal as the household was about escaping the pressures of city lifestyle, it was also about generating formative memories in the new setting. “We have been really eager on spending far more time with the young children and getting them excited about the outside,” Trollope suggests. “We’re in strolling length of the ski lifts, and can ski in and out of the household. We can go fishing, mountaineering, or off-roading. I consider it’s so critical for the kids to knowledge nature, and for me and Stephanie to be close to them though they’re discovering the splendor of the purely natural planet.”
As with their property in San Francisco, Trollope and his loved ones have fallen in adore with their Truckee abode. “When I glimpse close to the place, there’s stone flooring, concrete partitions, it all appears very industrial,” Trollope states. “But then the children appear racing in from the outside protected in snow, the puppy is leaping up and down, mud is likely all over the place, and it’s all so gorgeous. Nicole employed these pure materials to make it sense so robust, so livable.”
