Perfect on Purpose: Building the John Jennings Way

Some builders execute the vision. John Jennings protects it.

Architect: CLB Architects | Builder: Peak Builders | Photography: Matthew Millman

In the fall of 1985, a seventeen-year-old kid from Malibu hitchhiked to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He had grown up surfing and skateboarding, had learned carpentry as a teenager because he wanted money for a wetsuit, and had heard about a ski resort in the mountains from someone he met in Big Sur. He sent a postcard to a hippie uncle who lived there. The uncle wrote back. So he left California behind and headed east with almost nothing.

Forty years later, John Jennings is still in Jackson Hole. He has been running Peak Builders, one of the most respected construction companies in the valley, for 34 years. He has built some of the most architecturally ambitious residential projects in the mountain West. He has worked with world class architects on projects that push the limits of what can actually be built. And he has done it by holding himself to a standard that has nothing to do with what he can get away with.

"I strive for perfection," he says. "You know you'll never get it, but you can strive for it."

Peak Builders started in 1992 as the natural evolution of a moonlighting company Jennings had started two years earlier with a group of ski bum friends. They were good at it and they knew it.

By the end of the 1990s the company had grown into a substantial log house operation with more than 50 employees. Jennings owned his own subcontracting companies across almost every trade: excavation, concrete, cabinets, drywall, roofing, structural steel. He was on every job, overseeing every detail.

THE PRACTICE

New Model, Same Output

Over the following decades the market shifted and the workforce that had built Jackson Hole became harder to hold onto. So he reinvented. Instead of owning subcontracting companies outright, he built dedicated relationships that function like his own teams. The same people, project after project, trained to his standard. A different model. The same output.

"How do you reinvent yourself," he asks, "and still put out really the best quality work in Jackson Hole, or as far as I'm concerned, anywhere in the world?"

He answered that question by never letting the standard slip. Thirty-four years in, he was heading into a first meeting the morning after this conversation, architects still in concept phase, exactly where he wants to be.

THE PARTNERSHIP

Protecting the Paper

Jennings has been brought into most of his projects at the conceptual phase, sometimes sketches on a napkin, sometimes early schematic design. That is where a builder adds the most value. Not executing what is already figured out, but being part of figuring it out.

"Bringing in a G.C. who really knows what they're doing is incredibly valuable for an architect," he says. "There's no better benefit than somebody they can trust, who's not going to be an egomaniac, but passionate about better ways of doing things."

He is careful to say this cuts both ways. Builders who lack passion and spread themselves too thin produce worse buildings. So do architects who guard their ego and treat the drawings as final before the first shovel goes in.

The architects he respects most understand the value of early collaboration. A good contractor does not just build what is on paper. They protect what the paper is trying to say.

"We're all there to work as a team," he says. "It's not about who came up with what. It's complementing each other all the way through."

THE PROOF

The Riverbend

There is a house in Jackson Hole that John Jennings points to when he wants to show someone what perfection looks like.

It is called the Riverbend. The only home from Jackson Hole ever featured in Architectural Record, the most prestigious publication in residential architecture, and one of the most difficult to get into. CLB Architects applied and got it in. When the editors saw the finished work, Jennings says, they were blown away by the finishes.

Looking at it, it is not hard to understand why.

The house sits low in the landscape, a long horizontal form clad in warm wood with dark steel accents and board formed concrete at its anchoring volumes. Floor to ceiling glazing runs the length of the main living spaces, framing cottonwoods in fall color and mountains beyond in panels of black steel and glass. The covered walkway pulls the wood ceiling outside, drawing the eye toward the trees. Inside and outside do not feel like separate conditions. They feel like a single continuous experience that happens to have glass in the middle of it.

The powder room is the room that makes you stop. A barrel vaulted ceiling lined in shou sugi ban, executed by Jennings' own crew, runs the length of the space. Mirrors at both ends create an infinity effect, the arches repeating into the distance. Antique fixtures. Pendant bulbs dropping through the vault.

Seven years later the Riverbend looks the same as the day it was finished. That is not something he takes for granted.

"I want our houses to stand the test of time better than anybody else's," he says. "You look at any house after 20 years, it's going to weather. But the only thing that should appear to weather are things that we allow to patina over time. Because patina is a living thing. It changes its appearance. That's part of the design intent."

Everything else, he says, should look exactly the way it did when you walked away from it.

THE LEGACY

The Standard He Keeps

Passion is innate, Jennings says. You have it or you don't.

He notices everything. The moisture in a room before anyone else feels it. The person in an unsafe position on scaffolding. The screw on the driveway that 50 people walk past. He picks it up every time. Subcontractors add extra to their proposals because they know he will send them back to do it right. Not because he is difficult. Because it has to be right.

He worries about what happens when founders step back. The passion that built a company does not automatically transfer with the keys. He has watched it happen more than once.

The name stays. The standard doesn't.

It is why, after 34 years alone at the helm, he was careful about who he brought in as a partner. The person he chose shares the standard. That matters more to him than anything else about what comes next.

"We're going to partner up and keep doing what we're doing," he says, "building a strong team, year after year, and continue putting out the products we have."

Thirty-four years in, John Jennings is still on the scaffolding. He is still striving for perfection.

He is still building the John Jennings Way.

Peak Builders has been building architecturally ambitious custom homes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for 34 years. Learn more at peakbuildersjh.com.