A Big Kid's Tree House

Shopping for a Home with Ernie Graham
A Big Kid's Tree House

Design and inspiration for the Treehouse, a tall, rambling house set in the aspen woodlands of the Ski Ranches, grew in part out of Ernie Graham’s recognizing a blank spot in the milliondollar home market in the Mountain Village. He showed houses in the Mountain Village in the $3 to $4 million range that were "majestic," as he described them, but not "cozy and homey." For less than $3 to $4 million he could not find all of these qualities in one home.

"So I set out to build a great home to live in fulltime and one that you could entertain in," he said on a recent tour of the home. "Something you could live in and have house parties in."

The result: the Treehouse, a spec house built by Graham and designed by Bruce Wright of ONE Architects. From the exterior the house, clad in gray barnwood siding and tall and narrow in the middle, is reminiscent of a mill building. From the inside the house lives up to Graham’s expectations; it is at once big enough to entertain in, but not so big that a family of four living in the house would lose track of each other.

Eager, youthful and easygoing, Graham arrived in Telluride two years ago with his wife and two children, by way of Lexington, Ky.; Tulsa, Okla.; and Las Vegas, Nev. Along the way he sold networking hardware to Wal-Mart, worked for a tech start-up during the go-go days of the late 90s Internet boom and for two years commuted from Tulsa to company offices in Vegas. Though the Vegas-based start-up launched the second biggest IPO in 1999 – "we were all gazillionaires for about five minutes," said Graham, laughing – the commuting and intense pedal-to-the-metal workstyle threw his family "out of kilter."

When the company tanked, Graham and his family were ready for a change. They picked up and moved from Tulsa to their second home in the Knoll Estates in Mountain Village.

"It was like fantasy land," said the selfdescribed recovering workaholic about the transition to the San Juan Mountains. "When I first arrived, I was basking in the healing power of Telluride."

Though bathed in Telluride’s healing rays, the workaholic in Graham found ample opportunity to take up old habits.

"I learned over the first two years it takes as much time to get out of bad habits as it does to get into them," he said.

He moved to Telluride with the intention of taking some time to relax and reevaluate his work life; however within six months he joined Alpine Lodging and Real Estate, urged to come on board by Michael Salamon, Graham’s real estate agent when he bought the Knoll Estates home.

"I thought I could be measured," Graham said of the move. Within a short time though, he was working full tilt, until he broke his femur while skiing under Lift 9 last winter.

"I don’t mean to sound Pollyanna-ish," he said, explaining what the break meant to him. "But I was in the emergency room lying on the table and I realized that even though I thought I was a new thinker, and creating new balance in my work and my family, I was falling back into old ways."