In 2019, Architect Allison Bryan was wooed to Bozeman, Montana to become a creative director for a large architecture firm. Six years earlier, she had founded her own award-winning design firm Open Studio Collective in Portland—drawing from not just her architecture experience but years as a retail designer for Nike. She realized she liked being her own boss, and decided to restart OSC in Montana, even convincing many of its former employees to rejoin her.

After initially settling in a downtown Bozeman condo, Allison and her husband, architect Nic Smith, started looking for a centrally-located house to share with their daughter Ada, be it a renovation or a lot to build on. But they experienced both sticker-shock and scarcity, initially unable to find a new landing spot amidst the city’s feverish residential real-estate market. (According to the National Association of Realtors, as of July 2024, Montana’s median home prices were the fifth-highest in America, after Hawaii, Massachusetts, California and New York.)

Looking further out from city-center Bozeman, they found a circa-1967 split-level home in the New Hyalite View neighborhood, with its tall trees and ample walking-biking trails. The house needed work and was barely within their price range, but it gave them the opportunity they sought.

Before: Entry Foyer

After: Entry Foyer

The couple co-designed a full renovation, gutting the interior and removing several walls to make it more open and bring in natural light, with Allison agreeing to act as general contractor to save money. They were finally on their way, but then came a setback: divorce. Yet Allison, mid-stream on building the family dream-home, pushed ahead.

After all, this house wasn’t just a place for Allison and now 11-year old Ada to live. After over a decade of tailoring designs her clients’ programmatic needs and tastes, this was her chance to listen fully to her own creative voice. By acting as her own contractor and performing some of the finishing work herself, she could also save money and learn new skills.

“One of my team members at OSC said to me at one point, ‘This is so unequivocally your style, and we haven’t completely seen that before,’” Allison recalls.

Before: Living/Dining

After: Living/Dining

“OSC has a vibe, but we’re very sensitive to what the client wants. It's a collaboration. But this is very unequivocally like coming from my gut, which was super fun," she adds. "And I didn't even realize it was happening until somebody said something. They're like, 'Oh, this is very you.’ I guess it is, because I had just been sitting on ideas and inspirations I've been wanting to do for a long time.”

The completed home and its interiors are a study in curvy forms and fine-grained material craftsmanship, all on a deceptively modest budget of $111 per square foot. “It was pretty segmented, lots of different rooms,” she says. We got rid of bunch of walls, got rid of closets, and opened everything up.”

Entering the home, the large porthole window on its new front door, in combination with a transom window above and an additional strip of glass to the right, bring light into not only the foyer but the upstairs great room and a downstairs TV lounge. Inset within the adjacent wall is a custom piece of stained glass with interlocking circles, matching the window, while a white stairway banister rail hints at a cruise ship.

Before: Living Room

After: Living Room

“I think taking the old-school split level, it was bringing in those curves as well as keeping some of the original details, which together I felt would really make it pop and be a little almost like…not PoMo exactly, but slightly,” Allison explains. “I wanted to be playful with it, but also elegant.”

She prioritized working with friends and colleagues. Architect and furniture designer/maker Timothy Fouch of Portland firm Material, a friend of Allison and Nic’s from their days at the University of Oregon, created the kitchen signature: custom ash wood cabinetry, which pairs well with new maple flooring.

“The cabinet joinery has this beautiful handle detail that Tim made, and it's solid wood, not a veneer,” she says. “So you feel the expansion and contraction with the weather change here, which is so severe, which I love because it's just like letting the material be what it is supposed to be.”

Before: Kitchen

After: Kitchen

The ash dining table and hanging globe light fixture above it were made by two industry friends from Portland, respectively: custom furniture maker Robert Rahm of Marrow, and lighting designer Nash Martinez.

Allison also worked with a handful of Bozeman woman-owned businesses to choose the interiors, including the art galleries Echo Arts and Placed. A favorite artwork is a painting in the dining area by Helena artist Sandra Dal Poggetto (exhibited at Echo Arts) between two floor-to-ceiling cabinets. She also worked with woman-owned vintage rug and furniture purveyor District Loom and tile provider Onyx Tyle Studio.

Allison wanted a variety of surface materials and textures, starting with tile. In the kitchen, for example, the backslash is a Bedrosians Makoto porcelain tile, with subtle variations in its white tone creating a sense of hand-made variation. “It's super soft and calming, she says, “but then there's something with that your eye can look at.”

Before: Master Bedroom

After: Master Suite

The bathroom’s hexagonal Clé cement tile in a pink tone was chosen by Ada, Allison’s daughter. Installing the tile , Allison admits was a tough learning experience. “We tried to dry-stack that, which means barely any space in the seams, and it was next to impossible," she says. "I mean it was gnarly, but I was learning: ‘So okay, I'm not gonna do this again unless I'm an expert.’”

One of Allison’s relative splurges was hand-plastered walls everywhere except the basement TV lounge. “It just feels more grounding to me than just painted drywall,” she explains. “A lot of people might not understand that. But for me, I just feel better when I'm around plaster.”

But Allison justified the plastering by treating it as a lesson; she and Open Studio Collective principal Georgia Barnett took a DIY class offered by their subcontractor, Bozeman’s New Age Artisans, to create tadelakt, a waterproof plaster surface, so they could perform a portion of the plastering work themselves.

Before: Basement

After: Basement

“We spent like a week tadelakting together,” she recalls with a smile. “It was the ultimate team building experience, and we both learned so much. Having our team kind of get their hands dirty on projects, I think it's super important, because you just learn so much about a material’s detail.”

Before the renovation, the basement was a four-room space, so here as much as anywhere, walls came down. Today it's a wide-open TV lounge, partially daylit by the entry foyer's glass. It's a place Ada and her friends can hang out.

Before: Main Bath

After: Main Bath

Though this project was principally a renovation, there was an approximately 250-square-foot expansion at the rear of the house, in order to create a larger master bedroom suite. In fact, Allison has reserved a portion of that expanded footprint for a future portion yet to be completed: a sauna. When it's time to build , you can bet on the sauna being comprised of just the right wood, a collaboration with local colleagues, and Allison rolling up her sleeves to help install it.

And while it was a professional opportunity that first brought Allison to Bozeman, as this house makes clear, the city has become a place to put down roots and stay awhile.

More Before & Afters:

A Highland Park Fixer-Upper Sings With a New Archway Motif

They Brought Their Buff and Hensman Midcentury Back to Its Original Glory

Project Credits:

Architect of Record/Builder/Interior Design: Open Studio Collective

Cabinetry Design: Material