Frank Lloyd Wright taught them to camp on the land.
And these Midwestern natives did just that.
For more than 10 summers, Michael and Katherine McCoy slept outdoors on the Rocky Mountain parcel they bought after first falling in love with Colorado.
“I guess it was 1966, and we were college sweethearts. . . .”
Michael is reminiscing about that first trip to the West to visit Katherine, who was spending time between her semesters at Michigan State University as a summer-camp counselor.
“I drove out from Michigan, and that’s how we discovered that (Arkansas River) valley,” Michael says. “It was just kind of imprinted on us that someday we were going to live” in Colorado.
The McCoys now call Buena Vista home. They have been hanging around that town long enough to know that its name is pronounced “BEW-na vista” and locals simply call it “Bewnie.”
But when these arts educators and industrial designers — she’s more graphics, he’s more furniture — need an urban launching pad, they drive down from the mountains to their condo in Denver’s Golden Triangle.
“We have friends who live just down there on the Front Range,” Michael says, gesturing out the south-facing windows eight stories up. “We’re always joking that maybe we could do light signals.”
Several pieces of his high-concept, low-maintenance furniture are arranged around the condo. Their hard, angular designs are tastefully juxtaposed to her vivid framed posters, and collections of American Indian pottery and Japanese dolls.
This decorating scheme speaks volumes about the McCoys and their careers.
Together they served as co-chairs for 23 years of the graduate design program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, an academic enclave and National Historic Site in Michigan that has connections to such icons of American modernism as Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen and Frances Knoll.
Cranbrook allows faculty to concurrently work on personal projects and provided an opportunity for the McCoys to pitch furniture designs to Knoll International. Michael is credited with creating one of Knoll’s top-selling ergonomic office chairs, the Bulldog.
The McCoys also have served as guest museum curators, as they did last year for the “Streams of Modernism” exhibit at Denver’s Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art.
They were the first co-recipients of the National Design Award from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt museum.
Their work continues to require a place in the city — a contemporary residence that’s more obviously aligned with their sensibilities than their home in Buena Vista.
Their Denver home and studio, where the McCoys spend roughly a week each month, is actually two combined units at the top of an award-winning, mixed-use development: Grand Cherokee Lofts.
“Kathy likes maybe a little more stuff than I do,” Michael says of their decor.
“I’m the collector,” she concedes.
Yet, time has shown the McCoys how to capitalize on their slightly divergent tastes.
“We have many friends where one is a designer and one isn’t,” Michael says. In that case, “the designer will come home and maybe talk about something, but it doesn’t really get picked up on. But in our case, we bring ideas home and just amp them up.”
And they agreed, when shopping for condos, that this was the place. “It really reminds us of this old factory loft we used to have in Chicago,” he says.
It’s perched above a sculpture garden and looks out onto the changing fall colors along the Cherry Creek bike path.
“We really like the ceiling height and the big windows,” Michael says.
He and Katherine have since learned that the building’s architect, Denver’s Joseph Poli, is a Chicago native who once lived near the factory loft where the McCoys resided. Poli also is a fan of the work of Chicago architect Andrew Rebori, who conceived urban structures with placid inner courtyards akin to the one Poli designed for the Denver lofts.
The architect says his Grand Cherokee Lofts stand out among the downtown area’s many other young condo buildings because it was modeled not only after Rebori’s work but also after European buildings and their alluring courtyards.
“This project was all about, ‘What do you do in a midblock location?’ ” Poli says. “It was very important that we animate the ground floor.”
That meant incorporating street-level retail space, and using the courtyard to create privacy for the condo residents. As far as Poli is concerned, it was the happiest of coincidences that the William Havu Gallery was one of the first to move into the street-level spaces. The gallery shows outdoor sculpture in the courtyard as part of its purchase agreement.
“There are about 11 designated spaces” for outdoor sculpture in the courtyard behind his gallery, says owner William Havu. “Everybody seems to love it.”
Havu adds that the homeowners with whom his gallery shares the building never complain about his selection of artwork for the courtyard.
Some of them have even become customers.
The McCoys have plenty of their own art and decorative pieces to fill their condo. Yet few things are as apropos as coming home to a place that overlooks the William Havu Gallery’s sculpture garden.
“Walking through the garden,” Katherine says, “is just really a nice way to enter.”
Elana Ashanti Jefferson: 303-954-1957 or ejefferson@denverpost.com
