Mountain House Monday: Behind the Scenes of the Shoot and WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

After almost two years working on this project, we have finished the mountain house. That’s. just. nuts. I’m up here with my family for my kids’ summer break and pretty much living a dream. Yes, there is a huge sigh of relief and yes, I’m intentionally trying to NOT think about what’s next (but the brain doesn’t stop). We shot it last week for a magazine (you might have been following along on Insta stories), and it’s styled out completely with flowers, pistachios, branches…the works.

Its insanely fun to sit in your own work that you are proud of, let alone show it off to grandparents, friends and my brother’s family. Next week, when I get back from vacation, we are picking and announcing the winner of the “I Design, You Decide” contest (with a fun surprise for you guys, too). But here are some fun behind the scenes of the shoot, without showing you too much (House Beautiful wants things to be kept relatively a secret ’til the issue comes out August 13th).

A huge thank you to my design and production team Julie, Emily B., Velinda, Erik, Sara and Veronica for a long week of work and, of course, the editorial and marketing teams (Arlyn, Jess, Ryann, Grace and welcoming Caitlin today!) are now gearing up for the massive reveal. We are trying to figure out the best way to roll it out (learning from Portland’s reveal mistakes) and right now have landed on doing our version of a “Shark Week” where we do back-to-back reveals that are packaged up in a way that makes sense for experiencing the house so it doesn’t last for weeks/months. We’d be sure to do a big push prior so everyone can get pumped and know it’s coming, and you know what you’re coming back for every day for the week. It will take time to edit the photos, pull together the resources and write the posts. Additionally, we want to take a ton of video and social stuff so you can really see and experience it in different ways.

While we’ve already revealed a few rooms (kitchen, kids’ room, powder bath), this would be mostly everything else, all together.

This doesn’t mean we’re giving up on Mountain House Mondays. We’ll be leaning into more of renovation information for those of you who want to learn more. Things like picking materials or lighting for an entire house at once, or details to pay attention to that you might not think to (like what we learned about designing our stairs and railings). We’ll even address what really went into recladding our entire A-frame ceiling. Some of you will fall asleep, but for any of you who are pre or mid-renovation, you’ll want to know these things because BOY, LESSONS WERE LEARNED.

Although, I’m VERY happy to say that fewer lessons had to be learned than in Portland. I suppose that’s how it works; you gain experience with each project, learn more and more, make fewer and fewer mistakes and while you’ll never learn it all (by nature of every project needing to be different and unique), I feel like a MUCH better designer now than I did a year and a half ago. Which means that yes, we might be taking on some very selective residential client work to document for you guys…

So if any of you have suggestions or requests on how we roll this out (remember that each room has 10 photos at least with a lot to say and partners to shout out so we can’t do it all at once) OR if you have requests on other mountain house topics that we can cover until the reveals, please let us know in the comments. We want to show you how the sausage is made, but only if you like reading about this sausage.