Yellowstone Club’s new on-mountain restaurant, the Eglise Lodge, serves as a base camp for a 1000-acre ski and summer recreation expansion. Located atop the club’s first gondola, the mid-mountain location boasts panoramic views of Montana’s Gallatin Mountain Range.

The lodge was choreographed to create an environment suitable for the fine dining needs of a sophisticated clientele while responding to its rugged Montana setting. Designed as a low-slung volume, the building carefully nestles into the landscape. Clad in stone, split timbers, and a sheet steel, the overall design engages in a contemporary interpretation of materials rooted in the regional vernacular.

As a high-altitude fine-dining environment, the interiors program came with a specific set of challenges, creating a refined experience that would also be resilient to ski equipment and high traffic. CCY expressed the structural frame on the interior, creating an authenticity to the space, and resulting in a cohesive environment, inside and out.

To create a variety of views and opportunities for different types of experiences at different scales, the design configures the layout to include a large main space with dining booths tucked along the north wall, a more intimate lounge facing the ski hill to the south, and a private dining room with distant mountain range views.

To minimize the project’s carbon footprint and to facilitate a challenging high-altitude construction at 9,573 feet above sea level, CCY designed the roof structure with Cross Laminated Timbers, or CLT, supported with Glulam columns.