“These structures of the prairie - I love them,” she said. That’s why, when she was thinking of putting a retirement house on the land, she knew it would start with either a grain bin or a Quonset hut. Morris took after her father and loves the prairies, and the buildings found on them. Pancheau, builder Tom Skovron and Morris stop to talk on the iron catwalk leading into the house. Oddly enough, he never spent the night there, Morris said, probably because her late mother, Rosemary, was from Evanston, Ill., and did not care for the prairies. He never built any structures on the land, but he made a second, larger reservoir to complement the original irrigation reservoir, and he planted all of the many trees on the property. Morris said her father made the 30-minute drive out to the land almost every day, sometimes to relax but more often to get something done. The land near Vaughn was his rural retreat. Her father, Robert Morris, had owned the Self-Service Furniture Store in Great Falls and he loved to fish and hunt. Morris had the grain bin - your standard corrugated steel storage bin, 36 feet in diameter - erected on the side of a hill off Gordon Road, overlooking two cattail-ringed reservoirs and rolling hills of grass and wheat as far as the eye can see. When Pancheau visited Morris’ land near Vaughn, he quickly connected with the site, and with Morris’ vision of her future home. “If you just spend time on a site … it makes all the sense in the world.” “An important part of our architecture is making use of the site,” said Brian Johnson, another partner in the firm. Pancheau designed a cantilevered projection that extends out from the living room.Ī sense of place is key, as is a sense of the particular landscape on which a project is being planned. They like to quote Brian MacKay-Lyons, a Nova Scotian architect who said, “Originality is necessarily rooted in origin.” Other architects with the firm hail from Scobey, Great Falls, Billings and Roundup. Kanning is from Plentywood, Pancheau from Lockwood. Their pride, mixed with a bit of defensiveness, comes from their own backgrounds. Jeff Kanning, one of the four partners at the firm, said they were all tired of the architecture associated with the mountain valleys of western Montana - the “loggy stuff,” the green shutters, the McMansions of many gables. The concept is what the team at Collaborative Design Architects was calling Eastern Montana Modern, meant to describe a style of architecture and design that celebrates the landscape, materials and traditions of eastern Montana. Besides remembering Morris as his favorite teacher, what she had in mind on the property near Vaughn was a perfect match for a concept his architectural firm had been developing over the past few years. Another friend at the party, artist Jon Lodge, not only knew that Pancheau was in Billings, he had his number in his phone. Morris knew that Pancheau had earned a degree in architecture, but she didn’t know where he was. “I worked so hard at it.”Īrchitect Nich Pancheau and homeowner Kate Morris walk down the stairs past an interior wall of glass, which gives people in the living room a view of the enveloping grain bin. “I am the one who made him right-brained,” Morris said. Pancheau, now 30, was a kindergartner at Lockwood in 1988 and he studied art with Morris every year through the sixth grade. Morris had taught art classes at Lockwood School - Lockwood is an unincorporated community just east of Billings - from 1988 until she retired three years ago. Her plan was always to build a house inside the bin, but sometimes her friends wondered if she’d ever get beyond the talking stage.Īt a New Year’s Day party in Billings in 2013, Morris told some friends she was ready to start building, but that she didn’t want to proceed without the help of a young architect named Nick Pancheau. She bought the grain bin in 2005 and had it erected on 250 acres her late father bought in 1986. Morris had already experienced the same sense of inevitability. “So I said, ‘Let’s go.’ It’s meant to be.” “But I never built a grain bin house,” Skovron remembered telling him. Skovron said he told West he’d built 300 grain bins and 150 houses in his long career. She hadn’t had any luck finding a builder yet was Skovron interested? West told Skovron that Kate Morris, the daughter of an old friend of his, was planning to convert a grain bin into a house on some property about 20 miles northwest of Great Falls, near Vaughn. VAUGHN - Late last year, building contractor Tom Skovron was at the lumberyard in Great Falls when he ran into Art West. The view from Kate Morris’ grain bin house north of Great Falls is spectacular.
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