Photos: Courtesy Edgewood
The owners of this luxurious log home are born and raised Idahoans. He was a small-town boy who grew up to co-found Micron Corporation in Boise, serendipitously retiring just before the dot-com bubble burst. She grew up on a farm. Despite their current social stature, “They’re just down-to-earth people who made it big,” Brian Schafer, president of Edgewood — an Idaho-based log home company — says of the pair who would become his clients.
Like any couple, they had dreams they were still chasing, and one of them was to own a custom log home in Coeur d’Alene. However, they started their dream-home pursuit a little differently than most.
“They asked me to come to Boise to look at the house they were currently living in, because they liked the layout and wanted something similar,” explains Brian. “So I went through the house, took measurements and made notes, then applied them to the lakeside location and design of their new log home. In the end, though, the log house grew to be much larger — roughly 14,000 square feet.”
From those initial plans to move-in day, the process took about three years, and with a house this large and intricate, the lengthy design/build time comes as no surprise.
“One of their main design mandates was that they wanted each of their two teenage daughters to have her own spacious bedroom with en suite — preferably on either end of the house,” he says with a laugh. “But first and foremost they wanted to embrace the lake view.”
Brian designed the home’s footprint to wrap around the cove, with the house hugging the shoreline like outstretched arms. This topographic feature impacted the design significantly. “Usually if a house has 45-degree wings, they come off the back, but I ran these toward the front, like they are reaching out to the shore. As a result, you get a private view of the water from nearly every room,” Brian explains.
To take this unique design from paper sketch to livable log home, Brian and the Edgewood team employed 30-inch western larch to fabricate the scissor trusses and 18- to 24-inch tapered-diameter western red cedar for the company’s signature element: The Glass Forest. “Only two glass manufacturers on the planet can fabricate continuous panels this large,” Brian says of the insulated glazing that is essential to the expansive, uninterrupted views his Glass Forest wall system achieves.
The cedar trees that comprise the framework are debarked by hand — literally. No knives, chisels or tools of any kind are used. “There’s only about a month each year where you can harvest them and successfully strip the bark this way,” Brian says. “This is critical, because it leaves the character and the shape of the tree intact.” And character, both in the home’s design and its occupants, is what this spectacular log home is all about.
Home Details
Square Footage: 14,000
Bedrooms: 4 Bathrooms: 4 full, 4 half
Log Provider/ Designer: Edgewood
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