Riverwoods Mill | Mountain Shadows Residence | Colorado Springs

When Brett and Linnea Rubbico moved from Orange County, California to Colorado they saw an opportunity to design their new home themselves, to project their tastes, preferences and personalities. The result is a modern house that embodies the Rubbicos’ minimalist view of architecture, in which doors have no molding surrounds, baseboards are flush with the walls and the layout is completely rectangular.

“There is not a single radius corner anywhere in the house,” says Brett Rubbico.

The home sits on a wooded lot in the upscale Colorado community of Mountain Shadows at 7,000 ft (2,134 m) elevation, overlooking the city of Colorado Springs to the east with views of the higher mountain peaks to the west. An art consultant/dealer, Rubbico designed the house to show off his private art collection, taking advantage of the location’s abundant natural light while preventing damage to the artwork from direct sunlight. This affected everything from the placement of the house on the property to the position of windows.

This level of careful and precise planning is carried throughout the house. Both the exterior (white stucco with black window and roofline trim) and the interior are decorated in a black-and-white palette, including the minimalist kitchen and master bath at the heart of the house. For the couple and their two young girls, these are important rooms of the house, where they spend a great deal of their time.

Cabinetmaker Riverwoods Mill and the Rubbicos explored several cabinet designs and door options that would extend the black-and-white visual scheme while ensuring functionality. The final selections were Riverwoods Mill cabinets fronted with REHAU doors featuring REHAU’s RAUVISIO brilliant Bianco white and FENIX NTM Nero Ingo matte black surfaces.

“These doors fit into the flat, rectangular design of the house,” says Rubbico, “and maintain dramatic contrast between the black and white colors. And the difference in tactile feel between the mirror-smooth RAUVISIO brilliant Bianco finish and the soothing matte FENIX NTM Nero Ingo finish add a second subtle dimension of contrast.”

In the kitchen, a “floating” work island is topped with black soapstone accented with white veining, above cabinet doors of FENIX NTM Nero Ingo matte black. The sink counter is white Carrara marble with grey veining, and the upper cabinet doors are REHAU RAUVISIO brilliant Bianco gloss white. A unique functional feature added by Riverwoods Mill to the storage cabinet for the Rubbicos’ coffee/tea supply and coffee makers is a REHAU door that opens vertically, like a garage door, lifting and then sliding back into the cabinet.

In the master bathroom, where white is the dominant theme, the counter is white Carrara marble, while the cabinet doors are RAUVISIO brilliant Bianco gloss white.

“Everything came together perfectly in both rooms to give us exactly what we wanted,” says Rubbico. “We love it!”