Homewood Mountain Resort

Homewood Mountain Resort is not an easy place to build a picture of. It sits on the West Shore of Lake Tahoe, the largest private land holding in the Tahoe basin, and any change to it is studied closely, by the county, by the regional planning agency, and by a community that watches the West Shore like family land. JMA Ventures and its development partner, Discovery Land Company, were carrying the first phase of residences through entitlement, and they needed renderings that could do something specific and difficult: show new buildings at the resort's North Base that read as belonging to the mountain rather than imposing on it.

The brief came with two pressures at once. The first was coordination. The information needed to build the images was spread across six different teams, the master-plan architecture from Olson Kundig, the residence plans from Walton A+E, the landscape and planting schedules from VITA, and the gondola base terminal from Doppelmayr, with the owner and the operator both reviewing. No single file held the project. Someone had to gather all of it and reconcile the small conflicts between drawings into one accurate model.

The second pressure was the calendar. The kickoff call happened in late November, and the developer needed renderings in hand to submit to Placer County in the first days of January, with several images required by the end of December. That meant producing a full first set of color renderings straight through the Christmas and New Year break, on 24-hour review cycles, while most studios were closed.

Accuracy at this scale starts with the real drawings, so the studio modeled from the source files rather than from any single reference. The North Base residences were built from Olson Kundig's Revit model, including the later pop-out additions to the building elevations; the companion residence plans came from Walton A+E's CAD in their Type A and Type B layouts and mirrored variants; the site, paths, and planting were placed from VITA's most current base plan and vegetation schedules; and the gondola base terminal was constructed from Doppelmayr's design datasheet. Where versions disagreed, the team flagged it and confirmed which file was current before committing it to the model.

The governing design idea ran through every decision: the buildings had to sit lower than the tree canopies and settle into the slope, not stand above it. The studio set camera heights and tree heights so the architecture read as nestled into the forest, raised the pines and firs around the buildings, and scaled the gondola base terminal down so it supported the view instead of dominating it. To make the images read as the real place, the team planned the renderings to blend with real site photography, producing a drone-capture guideline so the developer's photographers could shoot the matching plates only after the camera angles were locked, ensuring the light and the lake belonged to the actual vantage points.

Six renderings carried the phase. One was an aerial master-plan view, framing both of the residential lots, the street layout, the gondola cable route, and generic vegetation standing in for the lots not being shown, so a reviewer could read the whole plan at a glance. The other five were eye-level views, set across summer and winter so the resort could be seen in both seasons it operates in. The studio first presented roughly forty camera-angle options in an online review tool, let the developer's team mark up the ones they wanted, and then built the chosen views, iterating on height, lens width, and how far the camera pulled back until each frame told the right story about scale.

The revision rounds were granular and architect-driven. Olson Kundig and the developer marked up exterior wall paneling to match the design-review elevation coloring, asked for the metal roofing to read darker than the wood and for a ribbed texture under the gables, called for indigenous planting pulled from VITA's schedule rather than generic shrubs, and added a blue band to the gondola terminal edge and cabins. To prepare the set for public outreach, the team also populated the renderings with people, walking the paths, gathering at the buildings, hiking the slope, so the images felt activated rather than empty. Across the break, with a reduced holiday crew, the studio delivered the first six color renderings and then an updated round in early January.