GRAND JUNCTION — This newly built, old-fashioned house lords over the Grand Valley, on a cliff adjacent to the jagged canyons and bubble-rock formations of the Colorado National Monument.
Construction finished three years ago, but the vision of this place had gestated in the mind of homeowner Greg Gunter for more than two decades. Some people keep a remodeling file; this guy had a drawer. Enough pictures of Tuscany and its architecture that rendering his own house drawings was easy.
Gunter was nothing if not inspired.
“I was in my early 30s when I finally got to do my grand tour of Europe,” he says. “I stayed in Tuscany and Umbria, and obviously went to Venice and Rome.”
The commercial real estate consultant, 49, recounts his first flirtation with wine-
country life while seated on his fire- pit-and-pizza-oven veranda with wife Robbie Martin, 50. Antique French terra cotta roofing tiles serve as sconces in this outdoor room overlooking the Colorado River. Support beams are reclaimed barn and factory wood.
Martin sips a pink grapefruit Bellini as opera music floats through her house. Mesquite crackles in an indoor fireplace, filling the air with a rustic musk.
This is Casa Sollevare, which the owners loosely translate as “to have one’s spirits lifted by the sun.”
“I love the old farmhouse architecture” in Italy, Gunter says. “This house that we have is a fattoria, not a villa.” The former is specifically a rural estate in Tuscany. The latter is a more general term for a wealthy country residence.
This dream house was meticulously designed as a companion to a high-desert landscape and built around antique materials and furnishings. Why, then, is it for sale?
Simple, Gunter says: “We’re doing another one.”
Casa Sollevare – complete with its limestone pedestal sink carved in Florence, marble-topped kitchen island and stylized wine cellar featuring a spooky nod to Edgar Allan Poe – is on the market for almost $2.6 million.
“That’s an architect for you,” says Martin, a nephrologist (kidney doctor) who most recently worked at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction. She explains that her husband studied architecture as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas. “He has this creative energy that just has to go somewhere.”
That somewhere will be San Miguel de Allende, where Gunter and Martin are almost done building their Spanish Colonial-style retirement home. They picked that town in central Mexico because of its cobblestone streets and colonial buildings, and its growing expatriate community. They lived in San Diego before coming to Colorado, and developed an affinity there for Spanish language and Mexican culture.
Martin also figures that all those American baby boomers swarming south for retirement can use another doctor.
“My wife and I are overworked professionals, without children, who agreed, at age 50, to make the transition to life at a gentler pace,” Gunter wrote in the April 2007 issue of International Living magazine. “Not retirement, exactly, but a life extolling forbidden siestas, midday art exhibits, and long lunches.”
Casa Sollevare reflects those whimsies. It almost came to life in San Diego, on a quiet lot at the end of a cul-de-sac in an urban canyon. Gunter and Martin lived there in the 1990s, in a 900-square-foot Craftsman-style bungalow, while they squirreled away money. Her career later ushered them to Colorado’s Western Slope, where a recent population serge, corporate relocations, and interest in the area’s vineyards and golfing has resulted in higher demand for luxury and retirement housing.
“Five years ago a million-dollar home project was news in the community,” says Diane Schwenke, president and CEO of the Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce. “Now it’s not unusual.”
When Gunter and Martin relocate again, they will leave behind a 4,000-square-foot custom house built to look like it evolved on the site over time – like the Italian sharecropper homes that began humbly and grew through generations into expansive estates. Gunter hunted out this spot because it sits up high, just like the towns in Tuscany.
He oriented the house so that each morning he and Martin rise to a view of the Colorado National Monument, and each evening they can watch the setting sun cast a “magical purple glow” over its cliffs and mesa.
He wrapped Casa Sollevare in French doors and windows that open – a departure from many of the other homes within the surrounding Redlands Mesa Gold Club that have fixed-pane windows. He hid utilitarian rooms like closets, pantries and offices at the center of the house so its brightest spaces can be populated with fresh herbs and plants and antiques. Sprawling patio and porch space is devoted to sangria and wine tastings with neighbors, and the occasional al fresco snooze.
The couple filled their yard with Italian terra cotta bowls and planters. Gunter’s “architectural folly,” a cupola salvaged from the demolished St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Chicago, stands among 200-year-old piñon pine and single-seed juniper trees.
Gunter insisted on old-fashioned cement mortar. He topped Casa Sollevare with a two-piece Roman-style roof. “There is nothing like the patina of old time,” he says.
Both details required specialty craftspeople who had worked out-of-state on warm-weather properties.
“I knew there would be old terra cotta,” he adds. “I knew there would be a lot of stone, a lot of timber and a lot of custom raw iron.”
Gunter’s vision of the house carried him back to Italy with his wife in 1998, on a trip at least partially inspired by the Frances Mayes book, “Under the Tuscan Sun.” It was largely devoted to cherry-picking things for Casa Sollevare.
Each detail counted, and it shows. In 2006, Colorado Homes and Lifestyle magazine named this its Home of the Year.
Gunter remembers clearly the moment in Italy that he and Martin arrived at the name of their house.
“We had been in Portofino for the day and we were taking a ferry back to Santa Margarita, right up the coast,” he says.
“We had been flipping through the dictionary, looking up all these sol words,” Martin adds. After 14 years of marriage, the best stories are recounted by both of them at the same time.
She liked Solleone, but it’s literal translation, “lion’s sun,” is negative. Bramasole? Taken. Girasole? Too common.
“Then she said, ‘How about Sollevare,”‘ Gunter concludes. “And I loved the sound of it.”
Elana Ashanti Jefferson: 303-954-1957 or ejefferson@denverpost.com
