Wild Horse Ranch

Our west coast design team, led by Architect David Shirley AIA, NCARB, CPHB, were approached by the owner of a very remote ranch property located in the Alvord Desert of southwest Oregon to design a functional horse barn for him and his wife, who is an avid horse lover.

Taking all the early collaborative design conversations with the owners to heart, David and the team developed three early design options for the ranches remote build site. The first was a very straightforward utilitarian timber design, the second a classic lyrical New Energy Works design, and the third a reverent cathedral-style design, modeled loosely after rib vault cathedral ceilings commonly found throughout Europe.

“To our surprise, when the clients came into our office to review these three very different options, they enthusiastically selected the cathedral option saying; “You son of a gun! You know darn well which one I am going to pick!”, David expounded. “After that meeting the clients really trusted us to fully design the rest of the space and have our timber frame shop start working on fabricating the timbers and assemblies to raise the frame on their beautiful ranch property.”