Photos by John Nation
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The Petersons and their two |
“BOLD HOUSES” is the slogan on architect and builder Jim Peterson’s personal business cards, and the Anchorage home he designed and built for himself and his wife Deb is no exception. Set on 15 lushly wooded acres, the jade-colored ranch is an uninhibited mix of Bauhaus and the American West, sprinkled with liberal dashes of fun, from the walkway pergola bearing the home’s name, Buck Run, to the navy polka dots adorning the bright yellow entry door.
Inside, furnishings created from cinderblock and sewer pipe are juxtaposed with pueblo-style pottery, his mother’s handcrafted quilts and his late father’s intricate woodwork. Ever-evolving — “A good house is never done,” Peterson asserts — the home chronicles the 1978 University of Kentucky graduate’s paradigm shift from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” design philosophy to Robert Venturi’s “less is a bore.”
“In 1990, when I built the house, my thoughts on design were very different,” Peterson explains. “I’d characterize the original interior as Spartan and cold — 18-foot ceilings, white walls and cupboards, and very little architectural detail. As I grow older, I find myself more attracted to the cottages in small European villages and the West. I’ve fallen in love with their stucco, heavy timbers and tile roofs.”
While Buck Run has received several additions since it was built, the Petersons have concentrated their most recent home-improvement efforts on cozying up the interior. Paint, wood, metal and stone are used in expressive and different ways to create a place that, Deb says, “I still love to come home to” after 16 years.
Dubbed the “Big Room,” the combination living/family room reflects the couple’s love of the desert Southwest. Many Southwestern details — from Native American rugs, throw pillows and pottery to jutting wood “latias” atop the wall separating the Big Room from the foyer — immediately catch the eye. Others are much subtler. The walls, for example, are nearly flush to the door casings and trim, and soft “bull-nosed” curves replace the sharp edges normally found around doors and windows. “Bull-nosed drywall is more labor intensive than square bead, so it’s more expensive,” says Jim. “It’s a look you don’t often find.”
 |  The eclecticism of the home's "Big Room" includes giant pots from Arizona holding beech tree limbs, a baby grand piano, and a vintage Victorian window frame with wreath. |  Recessed knickknack boxes on the fireplace wall have bull-nosed edges that l/files/storyimages/an adobe look. |
| Wooded bliss: the view from the Petersons’ rear screened-in porch. |
White walls and light, earth-toned colors prevent the Big Room’s naturally shady interior from being too dark. However, those same white walls made the room feel sterile. Peterson’s solution: painting one wall a rich Porter Lacquer Red and placing script listing some of the places he and his wife have hiked — from Jackson Hole, Wyo., to Flower Gap, N.C., over the long window wall. “The words are a lot more fun than crown molding,” Peterson says. “It’s a real conversation starter. Nobody ever talks about nine-piece crown mold.”
A new circular furniture grouping, composed of four mismatched chairs around a glass-topped table, also makes the room more inviting. “We used to have a couch there, but no one ever sat on it,” Peterson notes. “The new seating group gets used a lot. People gravitate to a circle, just like they do to a campfire.” To bring the 18-foot ceiling down and make the Big Room cozier, he recently installed double rafters he designed and fabricated in his workshop. “The rafters give the room texture and warmth,” he explains. “It’s like being in the hull of a ship.”
The multi-talented builder also created some of the Big Room’s furnishings. The coffee table in front of the fireplace, for instance, is actually a salvaged brick drying rack, while the tall tables behind the couches are fashioned from slate tiles bonded to 12-inch sewer pipe.
As an architect, Peterson has strong feelings about lighting — especially recessed lighting. “It’s only good for vacuuming!” he exclaims. Instead of overhead lights, the Big Room is lit by a combination of lamps for reading, softly glowing paper cylinders and candles for ambience, strings of garden lights for color, and uplights for dramatizing the Navaho rug over the mantel and a Victorian window frame mounted on one of the walls.
 |  A distinctive pergola proclaims the home’s name, Buck Run. |  A hand-forged candle tray above the dining room table is the room’s primary light source. |
| A view of the dining room from outside the house. |
In the dining room, Peterson replaced the white paper lantern that hung over the dining room table for years with an iron candle tray hand-forged by Pohl Iron & Wire Works. The new fixture, which holds more than a dozen pillar candles, works well with other changes he’s recently made, such as embellishing a window with elaborate, cloud-like trim and painting the wall above it brilliant blue. Many of the dining room furnishings are also his inventions, including the Mission-doored buffet with its stairstep-edged slate top and the garden gate table crowned with a granite slab, its bore holes intact. “I love the imperfection of the holes,” he says. “There’s no doubt it’s real granite.”
In the kitchen, the original white contemporary upper cabinets have been replaced with warm Shaker-style maple from The Burkhart Company. The island has also been warmed with a new granite top and a slate facade decorated with iron pickets. The forged plate rack nearby echoes the stairstep motif in the pickets. The Shaker doors were carried into the bar in the adjoining breakfast room, where Jim added a new twist with Old Souls cabinet hardware made from real river rock.
Instead of curtains, inlaid wooden cornices crafted by Peterson’s father hang above the windows in the kitchen and bar. And above the opening that leads from the kitchen to the breakfast room are words from one of the Petersons’ favorite Diana Krall tunes, “East of the Sun (And West of the Moon).”
In the master bedroom, the couple’s Craftsman-style bed is set on the diagonal. A platform behind it makes good use of the corner space. Lending Southwestern flair to the decor are the red and blue bedspread and the unglazed tile cornice. The Danish Modern chests received their vivid red, yellow and green designs when Jim got tired of looking at them. “I got out the paint and had a little fun with a brush,” he says.
Off the bedroom is Deb’s closet, a fashionista’s dream. At 240 square feet, it’s big enough to hold every piece of clothing and footwear she owns. “It grew in proportion to Jim’s woodshop on the other side of the house,” she explains. “It’s the talk of my friends. At cocktail parties, almost everyone make their pilgrimage to see it.”
In the time it took to get this story written, the Petersons have added a rustic steel “seismic frame” to the dining room door, replaced the plastic handles on the pantry doors with hand-forged copper levers and affixed a pair of ornate copper chimneys to the roof. Buck Run is, in short, constantly evolving. And that’s the way it should be, Jim maintains. “Thomas Jefferson didn’t stop working on Monticello until the day he died.”
