Love at First Sight in the Oregon Wilderness

RYAN BUCHANAN'S FIRST experience at the gated residential community of Black Butte Ranch in Central Oregon was as a dishwasher at the resort's lodge.

- NANCY KEATES

Now, some 30 years later, Buchanan, 50, has built a 4,800-square-foot, cedar-clad vacation house there for about $3.36 million.

“I fell in love with Black Butte and with Oregon,” says Buchanan, founder and chairman of a digital advertising and marketing firm in Portland, Ore.

He also fell madly in love with his wife, Shannon Buchanan, 57, at Black Butte, which is near Sisters and Bend. The couple got together at a New Year’s Eve party at Black Butte in 1999 and were married there in 2001.

The house the couple built is positioned so that three major peaks of the Oregon’s Cascade Mountains are visible from almost every room. The intention was to make it feel like a base camp from which they could launch their many and varied outdoor activities, such as biking, hiking and swimming in the lakes, says architect Thomas Robinson of Portland-based LEVER Architecture, which also designed the building for Ryan’s company in downtown Portland, a 40,000-square-foot “mass timber” structure that was prefabricated from regionally sourced, cross-laminated timber and completed in under a year.

Robinson used the analogy of a tent when deciding the siting. “Where you put a tent is based on shelter and what you would like to look at from the camp. The shape and orientation of the house reflect and frame the surrounding mountain landscape,” he says. To that end, he designed the rooms for the views, turning the openings toward the mountains.