Fresh Tracks

The design firm Electric Bowery reimagines après-ski style for one family's Utah getaway.

- Janelle Zara

Deer Valley, a resort tucked into Utah's Wasatch Mountains, is known for its towering pines and world-class slopes. For Julia DeWahl and Dan Romero, a pair of ski enthusiasts based in Venice, California, and their two young children, it became a second home once they came across a chalet with Swiss and Bavarian influences; the house's stone facade and ornately carved wooden balconies evoked memories of winter escapes to Northern Europe. For all its outward charms, however, the property had one major drawback: Its beige interiors were remarkably lacking in character.

"It was very much a developer project, with no special details," says Stephanie Luk, director of interiors for Electric Bowery, the Venice-based design and architecture studio founded by Lucia Bartholomew and Cayley Lambur that had overseen the family's primary residence. To overhaul this space, the team embraced what it describes as a "narrative-driven process, avoiding the obvious route of reproducing traditional ski chalet interiors to match the facade.

"Rather than a one-note, faux-interpretation of one specific style, we always find a layered approach," explains Bartholomew, one that merges the existing architecture with the clients' sensibilities, plus a few unexpected sources of inspiration. "When you take the philosophy and methods of construction from varying styles and put them together, you come up with something really new and very personal."