A Study In Contrasts - Knowing What You Don't Want
By Cara McDonald / Photos by Carter Photographics

When it comes to creating a real home, knowing what you don’t want is sometimes the shortest route to what you do want.

Everyday life for Tamas and Nilza Kallos usually plays out in Miami, Florida. It’s about work, lots of it, and sunshine, 100 percent humidity, and a condominium in a high-rise building surrounded by other hard-driving achievers. There’s a restaurant for nights when it’s too late to cook, a salon for last minute haircuts, and a gym where you can fall out of bed, ride the elevator, and be working out with a trainer in minutes.
           
For all its slick comfort, it’s a life that appeals less and less to the couple. Sure, it enabled them to have busy careers. Nilza runs a renowned diagnostic center for women with cancer; Tamas is a retired anesthesiologist. But it’s also a lifestyle their two daughters couldn’t wait to flee when they grew up. The girls landed in Colorado, and as soon as grandchildren entered the picture, the Kallos family began thinking about building a place to act as a magnet for the families. “We think of this house as bait for luring grandchildren,” says Tamas.
           
It’s not an uncommon strategy. But in this case the Kalloses went one better – they wanted the home to be the antithesis of their Miami life. So the Kalloses selected a site in Winter Park close to the National Forest. They wanted to snowshoe out their own back door, to watch foxes trot down the street, to have a place where the kids could sled in their own yard. “Above all,” says Nilza, “we wanted it to feel warm, not some mountain showplace. We built this place with a lot of thought and a lot of love.”
           
Designer Rick Mungeam helped them conceive a four-bedroom, four bath home that had the usual room for family and guests, an open floor plan and command-center kitchen. The home is set discreetly into a hill, with two master bedrooms and the main living area upstairs, with more bedrooms and a media room on the lower level. On the surface, it looks like a typical mountain getaway, but it was tweaked to speak to the couple’s love of family, art, and craftsmanship.
           
Builder Duane Sanderson of TDS Construction oversaw the creation of the home, down to brewing custom stains measured with eyedroppers in his garage in order to capture just the right hue for the home’s log accents. Four years after the home’s completion, they still remain close friends.
           
In deciding on the look of the home, the couple liked the aesthetics of log lodges, but worried about the maintenance, so Mungeam’s design incorporated Douglas fir beams as key accents, paired with soft, neutral stucco textures for the walls. Natural materials, like red oak and slate flooring, make for a warm feeling.

“It’s like I am two people, a doctor and a business owner, and then, when I arrive in the mountains, a grandmother, a cook and someone who reads books on the couch.”

A closer look inside the home reveals a host of subtle artistic details. Sanderson helped the couple find the fiberglass front door etched with an aspen grove by a Montana artist. Accent tiles in the kitchen sport subtle engravings of cougars, butterflies and lizards. Tile borders in the slate flooring are etched with sprigs of pine branches and pine cones. A custom stained-glass window hangs in the master bath. In the lower bath, bear tracks have been carved into the slate tile floor, with paw prints leading up to the toilet – as if a surprise visitor came for a bathroom break.
           
Some custom touches are more obvious. The upstairs powder room hosts a sink made out of a solid granite boulder on a peeled log base. Sanderson found an old fire log to split and form a rustic mantel for the fireplace in the family room. Art nooks were created out of leftover spaces and made to house Nilza’s collection of sculptures and lithographs. And a dead space at the foot of the staircase has become a meditation alcove, with a few toss pillows and inspirational calligraphy messages done by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
           
“When I open this door, I feel such warmth,” says Nilza. “We love simply being here.” A cliché by many standards, but coming from this family, the idea of home has a different meaning. Nilza is the child of Italian immigrants to Brazil. It was there she met her future husband, Tamas, when he fled Hungary in 1956. The two moved to the states in 1966.

So when asked, “Where is home?” Tamas laughs. It’s a complicated question for these two. But more and more, Nilza says that it’s here in Colorado. “It’s like I am two people, a doctor and a business owner, and then, when I arrive in the mountains, a grandmother, a cook and someone who reads books on the couch.” The house that the Kalloses built with such love is doing more than drawing the family together for a weekend of skiing; it’s knitting together a sense of rootedness and belonging, a place where they can finally come together, be themselves, and feel, at last, at home.

THE KALLOS FAMILY'S GRAND COUNTY FAVORITES:
Gifts: Plant Orphanage, Winter Park
Dinner: Fontenot’s, for blackened fish (Nilza doesn’t eat red meat)
Special Dinner: The Rapids, Grand Lake
Pizza with the Kids: Hernando's Pizza & Pasta Pub, Winter Park
Favorite Short Hike: The Twin Bridges loop off of Vasquez Road, Winter Park
Favorite Snowshoe: Vasquez Creek trail (parallels the creek)
Organic Groceries: Winter Park Market
Way to Unwind: A class with Margaret at Mountain Moon Yoga
Coffee: Rocky Mountain Roastery, Winter Park (especially their Sumatra, which the Kalloses bring home to Miami)

READ MORE STORIES FROM THIS ISSUE:
• The Green Parade: Green Profiles, Outdoor Furnaces, Timber Frames, Green Remodel, & Architecture
• A Rebirth on the River: Riverside Hotel
• Special Lifestyle Section
• 2009 Feature Articles