Stone Unveiled in Vail
Larry and Gail Homuth, owners of Peabody's Interiors, an interior design studio and furniture shop, received a first place award from the Colorado Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) in the category of commercial hospitality buildings under 10,000 square feet for their work on Zach's Cabin, the newest restaurant on Beaver CreekR Mountain located within Bachelor Gulch VillageR.
"We are a furniture store and interior design studio, and we have been in business for 24 years now," said Larry Homuth. "We are headquartered in Whitefish Bay, WI, where we have a 20,000-square-foot store and studio, but when we do projects such as this in Colorado where we live, Gail and I like to spearhead them ourselves. In this case, we completed Zach's Cabin on our own."
Vail Resorts Developer Co., the owner of the restaurant, held a bid competition among three design firms to determine who would be given the job of designing the interior of the restaurant. "Vail Resorts had seen some of our work in Colorado already, and the president of the corporation liked the style we were using and wanted us to work on this project," Homuth said. "With Zach's Cabin, we were involved in the planning phases from the beginning - right from the first lines on paper."
As the construction of the building got underway in 1998, weekly meetings were held to review the progress. "We had input on the selection of the stone that would be used for the major interior area of the flooring, where people were coming in off the mountain with ski boots on," Homuth said. "We selected a quartzite flooring for the area where customers would change their boots and used it throughout that whole level, right into the restrooms. It's very durable for the heavy ski boot traffic the floor would be faced with."
The architects from Oz Architecture in Denver, CO, chose the moss rock that was used in exterior construction and interior ornamentation. "Through meetings with the owners, the architect developed a general concept in terms of elevations and floor plans, at which point they began asking us for our concept of what the interior ought to look like," Homuth said. "After proposing several options, we hashed out the details in committee meetings."
Accessible only by skis, moving materials to the site was a difficult task, overcome by the use of semis, front-end loaders and snow cats. "It was definitely logistically challenging," Homuth said. "We had a temporary storage facility hauled up the mountain to store furniture and materials in, but the closest we could get it was 1/4 mile from the site, so we had to transport everything from storage to the site with snow cats after the snow fell."
Yet, the efforts were all rewarded in the end. The members of Bachelor Gulch have an award-winning new lunch spot to frequent while spending a day on the slopes, and Larry and Gail Homuth have the ASID award to decorate their own mantle.
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