The Haystack

Alturas Homes came to the studio with a pair. The Haystack and its sibling, François, are near-identical mountain-modern houses on neighboring lots at Tamarack Resort, the same floor plan and the same exterior, differing mainly in their garages, a retaining wall, and their finishes. Both had to be marketed, and the renderings were the marketing.

The brief was realism that belonged at Tamarack. Alturas sent photographs of the surrounding homes for the exteriors to match, so the render had to sit convincingly among houses already standing on the mountain. The catch was that the home was not fully built in 3D: the architectural model carried the cabinets, trim, and ceilings, but the lighting, plumbing fixtures, furniture, door styles, and bath hardware were not in it. And the first deliverable, the exteriors, was on a tight clock, Alturas needed them before Christmas.

To hit the holiday deadline, the exteriors skipped the studio's usual white-model step, where camera angles are chosen on an untextured model, and went straight to finished renders, with the angles set from the client's lead and the studio's eye. They had to match the neighborhood, so the materials, the mountain light, and the setting from Alturas's photographs of the surrounding homes were built into the scene, and the landscaping was art-directed to match the resort since there was no formal planting plan.

The interiors followed the proper workflow, white-model views first to lock the cameras, then color. Because so much of the home lived only on spec sheets, the studio modeled it in: the light fixtures, the plumbing trim, the furniture, the door styles, and the bath hardware, all added to match Alturas's drawings. And because the mountains are visible through every window, the view outside was matched to the exterior renders, so the inside and the outside told one continuous story.

With a near-identical twin next door differing mainly in its finishes, the finish was the variable that mattered most. So the home's two most finish-driven rooms were each rendered in two schemes. The kitchen appears in a warm cream and in a deep charcoal, the same room, from the same camera, with the same light and the same stone, only the cabinetry changed. The primary bath appears with a light vanity and with a dark one.

Seeing the identical space both ways turns the finish from a sample-board guess into a simple, side-by-side comparison. It is the same move that lets one carefully built model speak for more than one version of a home.