Beauty, Durability Provide Luxurious Outdoor Living in the Colorado Mountains
Browse Masterpiece Outdoor Living’s portfolio and you’ll see image after image of jaw-dropping decks fronting a backdrop of sweeping Colorado mountain views. In fact, the company’s designs are so awe-inspiring that several have been featured on the DIY Network TV show Mega Decks.
It was there that Masterpiece’s latest project began, when the new owners of a vacation home in Durango saw the show and sought out company Founder & Owner Garth Hystad to bring his signature touch to their aging outdoor space.
Creating a Stunning Hillside Retreat
The home’s existing 6×10 deck was too dangerous to walk on, but that was only the beginning of the project’s challenges. Most notably, the deck level is 30 feet in the air on the side of a mountain. Luckily, Masterpiece excels at navigating not only tough slopes, but other extremes of Colorado outdoor builds.
The team replaced the original deck with 1,300 square feet of luxurious living, with both an exposed deck and a covered, glassed-in four-season space. The covered area, featuring a soaring, skylighted ceiling decked in warm knotty wood paneling, includes a sitting room with a fireplace and hearth and an adjacent kitchen/dining area with a griddle, gas grill, charcoal grill with rotisserie, and outdoor refrigerator. Infrared heaters warm both sides, and sliding glass panels provide a seamless connection to the uncovered deck and expansive views beyond.
With warmth a critical element, the outdoor area also includes a glass-backed fire rail on the perimeter.
Durability From the Ground Up
Masterpiece used all steel framing elements to ensure the utmost structural and dimensional stability. Building the deck that high off the ground and on a slope required flying in material and using a boom truck to crane all of the framing elements into place, with the installation team using an array of scaffolding and rigging. For the deck surface itself, crews took a meticulous approach, with an eye toward tight miters, flush screws, and even gaps throughout.
The area’s extreme and variable conditions are chief reasons Masterpiece uses capped composite decking from Envision Outdoor Living Products for all of its projects. The Distinction decking specified for the Durango build—in Spiced Teak with a Rustic Walnut border in both the covered and uncovered spaces—combines an EverGrain Core with a high-density cap for durability and low maintenance.
“In Colorado it can be hot in the afternoon and cold at night. The Envision decking doesn’t have as much expansion and contraction in our temperature swings,” says Masterpiece’s Jud Turney. “You don’t see the gaps that you sometimes do with others.”
At the same time, Distinction’s HDPE cap provides durability for the other elements Colorado homes face, including massive snow loads. The team saw this first hand when the Durango project paused for the winter; the deck eventually had 15 feet of snow piled on it, but when the snow melted, the decking looked just as good as the day it was installed, and no boards needed to be replaced.
“Envision’s finish wrap is a lot stronger to scuffs and scores—it really holds up well,” Turney says, a reassurance for homeowners who have to shovel snow off of their decks.
Turney notes that Distinction’s appearance is also in keeping with the high-end aesthetics in which Masterpiece specializes: “Every board is different from the one next to it. The decking has more character, and looks more natural than others.”
The combination of beauty and durability is apparent across all of Masterpiece’s projects, where the company’s dedication to quality shows through, from the high-profile design features down to the smallest installation detail.
