ART & DESIGN: ART & TECHNOLOGY
DISCIPLINES CREATE UNIQUE GRANBY HOME
By Janet Day / Photos by Carter Photographics

Looking around Diane and Bill Edelstein’s Grand County home feels a lot like looking into a clear night sky: your eyes have to adjust a little before noticing the spectacular detail.

After focusing on the jaw-dropping Continental Divide panorama out the living room windows, visitors begin to notice the home’s detail: rope-wrapped ceiling beam joints, skip-sawn fir plank floors, knotty pine tongue-andgroove ceilings, rope-edged granite bar top, locally crafted pine furniture and handpainted murals.

And like the night sky, the Edelstein’s home is as fascinating for what is visible as for what is not. Behind the comfortable mountain décor lies innovative technology that allows the couple to minimize energy use, control house operations and monitor security.

The home is all about the seen and the unseen, the visible artistry and invisible technology, coming together to create what the Edelsteins say is a perfect place to live, work and entertain.

The 6,000-square-foot home overlooking the C Lazy U guest ranch north of Granby was designed and decorated by Diane Edelstein, a licensed interior designer who prefers to be called by her nickname, ”Smiley.” The smart-house technology was created by Bill, retired president and CEO of Cellular Communications Corporation (Cellular One™).

CAPTURING THE VIEW -
“The most important thing was the view,” Smiley said. “Maximizing the view, that’s what this house is all about.” The view is unlike any other in Grand County. It’s as if a rope was pulled through three of the county’s key landmarks, drawing them in a perfectly straight line. From the Edelstein’s back porch Berthoud Pass stands tall in the distance, perfectly behind Winter Park Resort, which is lined up exactly behind the SolVista Basin.

The view is repeated in a stunning threeand- one-half-foot by six-and-one-half foot glass room divider inside the front entryway. Two panes of glass were carved with the exact porch view of the mountains. One pane was carved in reverse; when mounted together the two glass panels mimic the view in a three dimensional depth. The glass panels were carved and installed in ten days by artist Joe Karaba of Rockledge, Florida.

On the other side of the glass is the dining room with a twelve-seat table crafted by neighbor Dale Mullinex with wood harvested from the property. Mullinex also created chairs, beds and other furniture. Smiley’s use of a rope motif can be found throughout the house, in the inset wood cabinet panels and the rope-edge granite bar top.

The table runner and window cornice board, like all the window coverings, were made by Smiley and reflect her affinity for the vintage cowboy look. The dining room’s tooled leather-look cornice board mimics the real thing on an antique saddle and vintage chaps she picked up in Texas.

Murals decorate three interior walls: a buffalo with red-tailed hawks above a doorway leading from the kitchen, a stage coach descending the basement stairs and a western landscape above the cabinetry in the lower-level kitchen. An artist, who lived in Grand County at the time the home was being built, painted all the murals. The mural along the stairs depicts the original road that ran from Grand Lake to Kremmling and was used by the Dexter Stagecoach Line. Remnants of the stage road can still be seen below the Edelstein’s fifty acre property.

DETAILED PRE-CONSTRUCTION PLANNING -
Smiley and Bill have been part-time Grand County residents for eighteen years. When it was time to build their dream home, the pair knew exactly what they wanted. Smiley, who acted as construction manager, created four designs for the home before getting it just right. During the project she was called the “Inspector”, because she was adept at finding all the little mistakes. Building started in September 2002; they moved in ten months later.

“We relied on both of our strengths. She handled the aesthetics; I handled the systems,” Bill said. “We were here every day during construction. We had so many specs for the house ahead of the building start, so many details about exactly what we wanted, that there were no surprises and very few changes.”

The Edelsteins hired Mike Winey of Granby’s Mountain Craft Homes as the general contractor to coordinate the project and hire the subcontractors. Mike Kohlwey of Kohlwey Mechanical in Granby provided the heating and mechanical work for the house. Wayne Miller of Power Systems, Inc. in Granby did much of the complicated electrical systems, and Mark Kay of Quantum AVA of Fraser assisted Bill with installation of the audio-video and automation systems.

“The house is perfect, a realization of my dream,” Smiley said. “The whole concept of this house, from the vintage cowboy touches, heavy textures, wood, metal, leather, and wrap-aroundporch, is meant to feel like it’s been here for a hundred years.”

While she is steadfast about what she wants, Smiley also is open to inventiveness and innovation, generally her own. In one inspired example, she converted an old wood-burning stove into a bathroom sink. Her clever touches are everywhere – from barn board wainscoting to highly varnished six-inch-deep pine stumps as doorstops.

The personal touch that makes Smiley smile the most is her brand. In the wee hours one morning she developed what’s become her signature Rocking Diamond E brand. “Edelstein in German means precious stone, a diamond is a precious stone; the ‘E’ for Edelstein; and it’s ‘rocking’ because I love rock and roll,” she said. The brand appears throughout the house, as an inlay in the master bath tile, branded into a pine glider on the wrap-around porch and carved into a dining room chair.

“The porch is probably my favorite place. I sit on my glider and watch the view, which is always changing with the light,” Smiley said. “We’re out there every day. It’s a wonderful place to contemplate.”

CUSTOM TECHNOLOGY -
While Diane was developing the look and feel of the house, Bill created the technology to manage it when the couple is away from Grand County.

The home’s meteorological station monitors all aspects of the weather with sophisticated sensors. The power system includes an automatic stand-by backup generator for when the power goes out, as it frequently does in the mountains. The Edelsteins store enough propane in buried tanks to keep the house heated and the generator operating for six months.

The elaborate electronic security system includes multiple cameras inside and outside that can be viewed and controlled via the Internet. Every system in the house – security, heating/cooling, power and communications – can be monitored and controlled remotely. Even the high-efficiency boiler manufactured by Viessmann of Germany can be controlled from afar to change the temperature of each zone in the radiant floor heating system or the driveway heating as the weather fluctuates.

The whole house audio system includes six separate audio zones. Each zone can play and control any source independently of the other zones. The sources include two AM/FM tuners, a satellite radio, a 300-disc CD changer and an iPod interface. The iPod interface allows Smiley to place her iPod in a docking station and then access the music throughout the house. Additionally the wrap-around deck has ten speakers to provide outdoor entertainment. The lower level entertainment system includes a highdefinition projection television system with Dolby seven-speaker theater surround sound. Bill installed a multi-line digital telephone system with its own voicemail and highspeed data network that provides the whole house with wired and wireless Internet.

Energy efficiency, including insulation and tinted windows, mean the Edelsteins can heat their house and the adjacent barn/garage/workshop with less than 1,000 gallons of propane per year. Eleven separately controlled heating zones throughout the house allow them to keep utility use to a minimum based on what rooms are being used. The downstairs fireplace is gas, but the upstairs has a new EPA-approved wood fireplace that uses outside air for combustion. A whole house humidification system circulates air and keeps the humidity around 36 percent.

The technological elements of the home are “a combination of features of my own design and those that anyone can get if they know about them,” Bill said. “You have to be comfortable living with all of it, and we are.”


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