An Ugly Duckling Ranch House Is Born Again as a Nature Center

by Ken Layne

GENOA, Nevada—We are the only species to formalize the creation of beauty—in our arts and occasionally our architecture—and we’re the only species capable of creating ugliness. This can be heartbreaking.

In the stunning geography of the American Southwest, where real estate bubbles and no-bid defense contracts have often substituted for a real economy, the housing stock is especially dreadful. Despite being the architectural birthplace of everything from the Spanish Missions to Frank Gehry, the West Coast mostly offers overpriced stucco boxes to its people. Just look around.

Whether you’re in the foreclosure wasteland encircling San Diego or the rural Sierra Nevada of grazing cattle and seven-month snowpack, the home of our era is a poorly constructed pile of the same plastic moldings and plastic light switches and granite countertops and pasteboard doors pretentiously pressed into raised panels of simulated wood grain. Garages face the best view or the southern light, a cramped backyard of crushed gravel and scraped dirt awaits the children, and the claustrophobic maze that makes up the floorplan leads to a tiny windowless “media room” where the exhausted new holders of an underwater 30-year mortgage can finally escape into the void of the flat screen.

It does not have to be this way.

Even a common, ugly “ranch house” of the 1990s can be elevated to a state of grace. Such an unlikely candidate for a memorable building is the new Whit Hall Interpretive Center at River Fork Ranch, an 800-acre wetlands preserve where the two forks of the Carson River meet beneath a wall of alpine mountains, just across the California border at Nevada’s first settlement, the still-tiny agricultural town of Genoa.

The land was purchased by the Nature Conservancy a decade ago, and in 2006 a private residence adjoining the preserve was bought up as a potential visitors center for one of the rare publicly accessible wild places in the Carson Valley. But the house seemed more like a teardown than anything worth rehabilitation. It was dark and gloomy, with too few windows and the kind of slipshod Home Depot construction sadly found even in million-dollar properties.

Outside this banal structure was a lot of carelessly bulldozed ground and a half-acre mud track where the previous occupants raced around in circles on off-road motorcycles.

Last weekend the interpretive center was opened to the public, at a ceremony that was well attended. The governor was a no-show, never a bad thing in Nevada, and those who addressed the crowd spoke about the rarity of this very green river valley in arid Nevada, the novelty of having public access to the river in a place that until recently lacked any public trails, and the beauty of the now bright and inviting ranch house.

What the architects did to this house could be done to any charmless residential box. They replaced endless drywall with beautiful triple-pane windows framed in old wood salvaged from the nearby Hall Ranch, home of the family that funded much of the work in memory of their son Whit Hall.

The cork and carpet-tile floors are clean and open, ready for use by school kids and for community events. Redwood tables and counters were made from the old deck boards, and there’s a rustic-modern feel from the salvaged corrugated metal sheets used here and there.

In this land of hot summers and snowy winters, the re-builders installed geothermal tubing under the new parking area to bring the ground’s steady temperature into the house. Solar panels for electricity and hot water are the roof of the great veranda outside, and the mud-buggy track has become a beautiful oval wetland that naturally treats the home’s wastewater.

It was all done on a tight budget, with the more ambitious plans shelved as the recession scared off donations to nonprofits everywhere. And it’s better that way, because this LEED-certified community house is not just another expensive showplace for the latest, most expensive green technologies. It’s a low-cost example for anyone looking to responsibly put up homes or rehabilitate a place that seems beyond hope.

There’s a wraparound deck to take advantage of snowcapped Job’s Peak and Slide Mountain rising up from the wetlands, and riverside trails that will eventually meet up with a valley-wide system through the Sierra foothills, open space and the adjoining towns of Minden and Gardnerville. Sandhill cranes, migrating fowl and a nesting pair of bald eagles caring for their young were among the easily viewed wildlife on opening day. And this rundown house-turned-visitor center at the twin forks of the Carson River has become an example of sustainable, beautiful and affordable residential remodeling in a region that has been brutalized by the collapse of the housing bubble.

For the tens of millions of American homeowners who have been forced to put aside the shoddy American Dream of regularly trading up to a bigger, more vulgar single-family home, projects like the Whit Hall Interpretive Center show how much can be done with what we already have.

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