Vacation Mode: Designer Ethan Greenfeld Incorporates Cambria Natural Quartz into an Idyllic Mountain Home

When Ethan Greenfeld of Ethan Charles Design’s longtime clients went in search of a retreat, they had a beach house in mind: sun, surf, and sand. But nothing they saw quite landed. Then, on one of their regular trips to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho—a place they’d loved since their son was small—they made the kind of decision that reshapes family life: skip the coast, build in the mountains.

That the project went to Greenfeld was never in question. This husband and wife were Greenfeld’s very first clients, nearly a decade ago, before he’d gone out on his own as an interior designer. He decorated their Los Angeles home, only four blocks from his own front door. He knew how they lived, what they’d invest in, and where they’d push back. “It smooths out the entire process,” Greenfeld says of their history. “There were no revisions, which is really great.” 

The brief, as he describes it, was to bring California to Black Rock, the lakeside community where the Idaho house sits. The local vernacular there runs to reclaimed timber and rough-hewn redwood. Handsome as that is, it’s not this family’s design language, and not Greenfeld’s. He envisioned a home that read as belonging nowhere in particular and everywhere at once. The palette stayed in the neutrals both he and his clients gravitate toward, warmed by the faintest infusions of color borrowed straight from the windows: the lake, the hills, the trees beyond.

Stone does much of the quiet work here. The clients had fallen for Cambria natural quartz surfaces when designing their California house. They asked for them again, so Greenfeld threaded a single Cambria design, Charlestown™, through the laundry room, office, butler’s pantry, and on the living room fireplace facade. The fireplace surround, dark and dramatic, was a deliberate gamble. Its depth comes from the quartz design’s veining rather than any detailed fabrication.

Everleigh Warm is in the kitchen and Colton in a matte finish anchors the lower-level bar. He’s disciplined about this. “I didn’t want to invite in another stone,” says Greenfeld. “I just thought it was going to get too busy.” 

For all its 4,800 square feet, this house keeps a surprisingly compact kitchen. His client cooks, but not for a crowd, and never wanted a cavernous setup that this much square footage might suggest. Instead, Greenfeld maximized every inch of space with multiple ovens, multiple dishwashers, and storage tucked everywhere, subtly utilitarian but undeniably beautiful.

What stays with him isn’t a single room but the making of it—a trusting client, an L.A. team flown in for cabinetry and drapery, and a local builder, Caleb Bravard of RSB Customs, he’d happily clone. “He’s one of my favorite people I’ve ever worked with,” Greenfeld says. The house, you sense, knows it.

Read this article as it appears in the magazine.