A steep, rocky, wooded mountainside 8,000 feet above sea level is not most people's idea of a buildable lot. For architect Eric McRoberts, it was exactly that. What followed required a particular discipline: building on a mountain while leaving it looking untouched, choosing materials not for impact but for harmony. The Colorado home he designed for himself and his wife in Evergreen is a quiet, considered exercise in exactly that.
Primary Architect: Eric McRoberts, RLPS Architects
Location: Evergreen, Colorado, USA
Constructed Area: 2,200 square feet
Completion Year: 2023
Cladding Product: Fiberon® Wildwood™ Composite Cladding
Collection: Sahara Collection
Color: Palo
Design
McRoberts purchased the mountainside plot roughly five years before construction began, drawn by its dramatic views of some of Colorado's tallest peaks. With all four of his children already living in the Rocky Mountain State, the site was the natural choice for the next chapter. "Every architect envisions building their own dream home once in their life," he explained. "So, this was our opportunity to do just that."
The 2,200-square-foot home is compact by intention, but generous in its relationship to the landscape. Sixty-five windows dissolve the threshold between interior and exterior, pulling the mountain panorama into nearly every room. The section is simple and the footprint modest, but the experience of moving through the home is defined by an ever-present connection to the site around it.
The defining feature of the composition is its sawtooth roofline: four mirroring slopes that carefully trace the ridgeline of its surroundings. It is a formally precise move, and one that McRoberts arrived at deliberately. "When you look at the slope of the roofs, they match the slope of the mountains behind the house almost identically," he noted. The geometry is site-specific in the truest sense, shaped by the landscape rather than imposed upon it. That same roofline also does practical work. The south-facing pitches were oriented from the outset to support an integrated solar array, linking the building's form directly to its environmental ambitions.
The exposed structural frame, with its light-toned timber columns and beams, gives the home a sense of weight and craft that keeps the design feeling human in scale. Against that lightness, the dark cladding reads as shadow and mass, grounding the structure in its surroundings. The interplay between the two is quiet but deliberate. Light wood reaches toward the sky, while dark composite retreats into the hillside. Between them, they do what good material selection always does: they make the architecture feel like it could not have been built anywhere else.
Materials
Finding an exterior cladding that could hold its own visually against a Colorado mountainscape, while requiring minimal maintenance at altitude, was a central challenge of the project. McRoberts found his answer in Fiberon® Wildwood™ composite cladding.
"The point of this house was that we wanted it to look very natural with the setting. So, the fact that Fiberon® Wildwood™ comes in different colors and finishes that have a wood look to them, we liked the way it blended into the environment."
- Eric McRoberts
After considering multiple colorways, including a two-tone approach, the McRoberts settled on Palo from the Sahara Collection for the near-total exterior wrap.
The Sahara Collection's pronounced wood-grain texture played a deliberate role in that decision. Unlike the smoother Eden Collection, the Sahara finish carries a deeper, more tactile relief that registers differently at close range. "You notice the grain when you're up close to it," McRoberts said, "and being that we had an exposed wood frame of the building, we thought it complemented those columns and beams a little nicer."
The brownish-gray tones of Palo recede into the rocky, wooded terrain, while the textural depth keeps the façade from feeling flat. Paired with the exposed timber frame, it's a restrained and confident exterior language: two materials in dialogue, neither competing for attention.
To explore Fiberon’s Wildwood cladding products in more detail, visit www.fiberoncladding.com. You can download Revit files for Fiberon's architectural cladding products on BIMsmith and samples are also available for free on Swatchbox Pro.
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