Luxury, Down to the Inch

At Turkel Design, pre-fabrication is an art, not a shortcut.

“Prefab is not a dirty word,” said Meelena Turkel, founding partner of Turkel Design with her husband, Joel Turkel. “It's the connotation it comes with, that something is quick and dirty, which can be misleading. For us, prefabrication is more about bringing reliability. It allows us to deliver a high-quality product – to take the unknowns and make them known."

There is nothing quick and dirty about Thunder Road Reaches, a relatively new luxury property on the banks of Fish Creek. The main house, guest house and gear barn glow warmly on cool mountain nights, when the Tetons seem to rise directly out of the great room. Vast, open gathering areas with hemlock ceilings lead to cozy, private spaces, accented with grey onyx tile. The creek meanders lazily within easy walking distance of the covered patio and fire pit. Outside, the walls are finished with Shou Sugi Ban, a wood that has been charred using an ancient Japanese technique to give it a blackened appearance and increased durability.

Thunder Road Reaches is thoroughly modern, and yet it feels at home in these rustic mountains. Hardly anyone outside of Turkel Design would know most of the components were built off-site and assembled with cost, consistency and the client in mind.

“Building a custom home is never easy,” Meelena admitted. “It is a great challenge and a great opportunity. There is a lot of untapped opportunity for systemization in this industry, and not to make a home more standard or banal, but to do the opposite – to make it more precise, more beautiful, more regionally appropriate.”

Modern-day Models

Like every Turkel home, this one began with an extensive site visit and pre-planning with the clients. The property owners, a family of successful entrepreneurs from Texas, wanted a resort-like compound with multiple buildings and plenty of space for hobbies, like fly-fishing and a luxury car collection.

“This is a really special piece of land,” Meelena observed. “It's extraordinary. The river is romantic, the views are astounding, but it's not just the view. It's the light, the air, it's the things that make life worth living, feeling the nature of it all.”

Meelena and her team took “the nature of it all” back to their offices in Boston and plugged it into a digital model. That’s where the property first came to life – on a computer – where the team designed and detailed walls, windows and even cabinets to complement the site’s natural beauty, rather than dominate it. 

Technology is second nature for the Turkels. They met at MIT while researching systems-built architecture. Since founding their firm in 2008 with partner Jake Wright, they have designed and built more than 300 custom properties in North America and beyond. The classroom is great for theory, Meelena said. But nothing compares to putting those theories into action.
    
“Every week we challenge ourselves to say, ‘How can this be more simple, more effective, more efficient?'" Meelena said. “Each home is designed to respond to a site and facilitate the lifestyle of the homeowner. Prefab is a great thing because you can control quality, cost and timeline even. It doesn't mean this is a box that shows up on a truck."

Erasing the Unknowns

The Turkel team isn’t content to sit back and keep doing the same old thing. Since designing the Thunder Road Reaches property, they have adopted a new point-cloud site-scanning method that they have incorporated into the 3D-modeling program to achieve astounding precision.

Take, for example, a client who wants to incorporate a distinctive tree, maybe one that has been on the site for decades. This additional data lets the architects design around the trunk and even the branches, down to fractions of an inch. Precision helps to erase mistakes, which manages three factors every architect, builder and client must battle. 

“The cost, the timeline and the quality,” Meelena said. “Our practice is unique in that we provide the physical components that comprise the home. This ensures precision and quality that is difficult to achieve with traditional construction."

Back to the Client

Through it all, the team in Boston never forgot Fish Creek and the family who would soon call it home. They worked with a local builder, Northview Building Group, to manage hyper-local concerns like permitting and finishing. Again, precision planning helps Turkel Design deliver exactly what the client will love.

“There are some architects who are happy to simply draw,” Meelena said. “For us, the priority is to build, because we know that's why our clients hire us. They want to build a home that will make their life better and we want to help them get there."