Durango Custom Log Home Builders

The fireplace mantel, a gift from custom log home builder and contractor Terry Dyer, is accented with iron bands, copper tubing and copper nails. Victorian-style tufted leather couches and chairs are seated around a 1920s copper chocolate pot covered into a coffee table. Dave Manley cut the stone for the tabletop with its steel rim and picked the brilliant colored fieldstone from the property for the wood-burning fireplace.

Durango Custom Log Home Builders

An aptitude test Bryan Hondru took in school indicated that he should pursue a career as a forest ranger. He liked the outdoors, but instead he became a commercial insurance broker. He and his wife, Joyce, spent most of their adult lives in western Pennsylvania. Even while raising three sons, however, Bryan’s passion for forests and mountains did not diminish. The family’s love of heights eventually led them to build a home on top of Mount Washington, overlooking downtown Pittsburgh, with a view of Heinz Field and PNC Park.The Hondrus also spent many a vacation skiing in the Rockies. During this time, they often looked at real estate, hoping one day to build a vacation log home. “In 1997, my son Mark called to tell me I should catch the first plane from Pittsburgh to Durango, Colorado,” Bryan recalls. “He had been camping in the San Juan Mountains and had found an area that he thought would be perfect for our log home.”The Hondrus agreed and purchased a 35-acre parcel bordering a beaver dam with a 12-acre stocked bass and trout lake in the just-opened gated community of Celadon. Situated on Missionary Ridge at around 7,500 feet elevation, the property suited the couple’s taste for heights and would afford them a 360-degree panorama that included the Animas Valley all the way to Durango and featured a view into the Animas River Gorge, where the jump scene from the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was filmed. Bryan and Joyce selected Edgewood Log Structures in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to produce their logs. The company also provided the drafting and structural engineering documents, based on the design plans drawn by architect Joe Sebestyen of Designlab in Durango. “One of the greatest compliments we have received from a customer is when Bryan Hondru said, ‘Given the design, location and schedule of the project, no one else could have done what you did,’” Edgewood’s president, Brian Schafer-Vinson, relates.

| Log Homes Illustrated SEPT 2006 |

	Joyce and Bryan purchased the dining set with its door-like top and iron hinge accents from Termar Gallery in Durango. Large spruce beams and posts define the doorway between the formal dining room and kitchen.
Skip-trowel finish with a green-tone faux painting by Deb Herbold adds another texture to the spruce walls and ceiling beams. Distressed maple plank flooring was installed in both the master bedroom and the great room.

| Log Homes Illustrated SEPT 2006 |