By: Laurenz Busch
The homes of the Flathead Valley are inspired by everything that surrounds us, the light coming off the lake, the grain of local timber, the way a family actually lives once the snow melts and muddy boots trudge through the door. For this special edition feature, we hand these pages to the talented people who know those homes best. The region’s interior designers share the ideas that guide their work. Their studios stretch from Whitefish to Bigfork, and several of them arrived here drawn by the landscape. One begins with light, another with the kitchen, another by listening, but convictions run through all of them, that well-made homes are built to be lived in for decades, that natural materials only grow more beautiful with time, and that the country outside the window belongs inside the house, too.
WE HOPE THIS FEATURE INSPIRES YOU TO SEE
YOUR OWN SPACES IN A NEW LIGHT
When a Room Feels Right
Some homes are full of beautiful things and still never feel quite right. Others, you walk in and exhale. For Sara Marcille, founder of Mountain Home Collective, the difference is rarely one dramatic decision. It’s the accumulation of small choices about scale, sightlines, light, and circulation, most of them made long before anyone walks through the finished room.
Marcille built her early career in Whitefish as the Flathead filled with families arriving from bigger cities, many building custom homes for the first time. She later left for Chicago, working on high-end residential projects and immersing herself in the world of makers and materials at the Merchandise Mart, then brought that experience home. Today, her team of 10 works alongside architects, builders, and craftspeople on custom homes across Montana, often starting well before the interiors are visible. She calls the goal “livable luxury”—a home that’s deeply considered and beautifully made without ever feeling precious.
“OUR BRAINS ARE INCREDIBLY GOOD AT RECOGNIZING WHEN SOMETHING IS OUT OF BALANCE, EVEN WHEN WE DON’T HAVE THE VOCABULARY TO EXPLAIN WHY.”
WHJ: When a room feels off but the homeowner can’t say why, what’s usually going on?
Sara Marcille: I start with scale and proportion. Our brains are very good at noticing when something is out of balance, even when we don’t have the words for it. Western homes make it tricky. A soaring roofline, big glass, heavy timbers, and a large fireplace can all live in one room. A light fixture can be beautiful and still be wrong for the volume. A fireplace can be impressive and still feel underscaled. When those relationships are right, you don’t notice them—you just feel comfortable.
“OUR MISSION IS TO CREATE HOMES THAT ARE ELEVATED AND DEEPLY CONSIDERED, BUT COMFORTABLE ENOUGH FOR REAL LIFE.”
Livable Luxury
Some of the decisions that shape daily life happen before there’s anything beautiful to photograph. They happen on a floor plan. A hallway gains six inches. A doorway grows taller. A mudroom gets reconsidered because four people arriving home at once need somewhere to actually stand.
WHJ: Which decisions matter most as far as how a home feels day to day, even the ones no one sees?
Sara Marcille: Homeowners spend a lot of time on kitchen size or the primary suite. We’re thinking about everything between those spaces. Can someone open the refrigerator while another person is working at the island? Does the mudroom still work when the whole family comes in at once? Sometimes six inches is the difference between something fitting and something feeling generous. That’s why we build furniture plans early. Furniture tells us whether the architecture will support the way someone actually wants to live.
Small Decisions, Lasting Effects
- Circulation
- A few extra inches can change how comfortably people move through a home.
- Doorways
- Height and placement shape both proportion and the sense of transition.
- Furniture planning
- Layouts drawn early reveal problems while they’re still easy to fix.
- Kitchen clearances
- The gap between adequate and generous is measured in inches, felt daily.
“A ROOM CAN MEET EVERY DIMENSIONAL REQUIREMENT ON PAPER AND STILL NOT LIVE BEAUTIFULLY.”
What the Eye Sees First
WHJ: Which small details have the biggest effect on how “finished” a home feels?
Sara Marcille: We spend a surprising amount of time on what your eye lands on. When you walk into a room, we want you to catch the mountains through the window, or the fireplace at the end of it. In a bathroom, we’re protecting the sightline so the first thing you see isn’t the toilet. Outlets, switches, vents, lighting controls all have to exist. They don’t all deserve equal importance. The trick is handling them early enough to resolve them on purpose instead of working around them later. That, to me, is the difference between decorating a house and designing a home.
- Things That Shouldn’t Steal the Show
- Thermostats
- Floor registers
- Switch clusters
- Speakers and controls
- Handled early, they disappear into the design instead of competing with it.
- Beyond the Visual
- Heard | acoustics softened with rugs, drapery, and upholstery
- Touched | layered natural materials that invite you in
- Remembered | a signature scent that lingers
“GREAT DESIGN IS PARTLY ABOUT DECIDING WHAT DESERVES YOUR ATTENTION, AND WHAT DOESN’T.”
Designing for Memory
WHJ: A well-designed home isn’t only something you look at. How do you design for the rest of it?
Sara Marcille: You can build an extraordinary great room, but if eight people sit down to dinner and can’t hear one another, something’s been missed. We use rugs, drapery, and upholstery to soften the hard surfaces—never to diminish the architecture, but to make it comfortable to live in. In a big room, the instinct is to spread everything out, but conversation falls apart when people sit too far apart. Sometimes the most luxurious thing we can do is make a large room feel intimate.
The firm even helps homeowners choose a signature scent for a home. Years later, some are still ordering the same candle.
Sara Marcille:Ultimately, we’re designing for memory—Christmas morning, dinner with friends, a quiet Sunday by the fire. The best compliment isn’t that someone notices every decision we make. It’s that they walk in and say, “I love how I feel here.”
- Mountain Home Collective Valued Partners
- SAV | Eyehear – Whole Home Automation
- Dynamic Thread – Window Treatments
- Cutting Edge Paint + Paper – Wallpaper
“SOMETIMES THE MOST LUXURIOUS THING WE CAN DO IS MAKE A LARGE ROOM FEEL INTIMATE.”
whj INTERIOR DESIGN FEATURE
