As told to Linda Hayes
Images by Kelsey Brunner and courtesy of Rowland+Broughton
John Rowland: Sarah and I met in 1993 during our first design studio course at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Environmental Design school. She had long hippie hair and wore overalls with Birkenstocks. The second semester, we’d each present projects we’d been working on. I’ll never forget standing in front of my class every Friday and nobody had questions about my design except Sarah. Why did I choose that color? She drove me crazy! After 12 hours a week together, we got to know each other and became class buddies. The end of that semester, we became romantic.
Sarah Broughton: John was thoughtful and adventurous. We shared a passion. We pushed and influenced each other on both professional and personal levels. After graduation, we got married and moved to New York to work, then to Australia, where we worked for competing firms. But in addition to being ambitious about our careers, we really wanted to be in a community that had a lot of cultural offerings as well as the great outdoors, so we moved to Aspen in 2000.
JR: During those early days of getting our practice going, we worked out of our 600-square-foot condo. Our conference table—a butcher-block mounted on file cabinets—was also our dining table. We worked there 16 hours a day.
SB: I’ll never forget, we had a client at that time who said, “We’re going to remember when we sat at this table and had meetings in your kitchen!” It was challenging, but we built up our street cred within the community and within our professional network. Along the way, we came to realize how important it is to sustain the legacy of historic buildings. It spurred our passion for historic preservation and became a foundation of our firm, Rowland+Broughton, which we founded in 2003.
JR: Preserving the heritage and legacy of this special town and its evolution over time is paramount to telling the story of the West.
SB: There’s so much energy in historical buildings. We believe that one of the most sustainable things to do is preserve them and look to them for lessons on how to build to last. Creating a living heritage within our built environment is so important.
JR: It’s a concept that we’ve embraced in all of our work, whether it’s residential or commercial, architecture or interior design, and in our personal lives. When we built our home in the West End in 2015, we picked up the historic 1890s house that was there on a double-wide lot and placed it on a new foundation, which created a vacant lot to build on. We got approval from the Historic Preservation Commission to design a house that retained the historic home’s traditional detailing—like the gable form and traditional clapboard siding—but was also modern in its own way. We were able to achieve LEED gold certification for energy efficiency.
SB: We’ve chosen to keep our nuclear family small, so having friends and family over is a huge part of our life. We designed the doors to pocket back into the walls, allowing the living room to dissolve into the backyard and bocce ball court beyond. There’s plenty of wall space so that we can live among art. We love to cook, so the open kitchen is really great. There’s a banquette for dinner parties and an office so we can work at home. It feels very much like us.
JR: Our commitment to preservation also applies to our studio at the top of Main Street, which we opened in 2019. When we first came to town, we were in awe of the historic building— its stature, its traditional storefront. We studied how it looked over time and restored it with a commitment to preservation and also to creating a flexible, collaborative interior for our team. We went through a similar process for our Denver studio, which is located in a historic building in the city’s LoDo neighborhood, and recently for our rehabilitation of the Aspen Institute’s historic Boettcher Building, originally designed by Herbert Bayer.
SB: After 22 years here, we feel so fortunate to be a part of this community and to engage with the landscape, the town, and the creativity here, and with people who are aligned with our passion—especially our clients, who mentor us as much as we mentor them. We’re optimistic about where we are and where we’re going. It’s getting better all the time.