Silver City, Nevada - News that Lyon Couny has begun enforcing codes made me think about the way houses were built in the good old days in Silver City. For instance, the unusual home where my husband grew up and later raised his own children would not be allowed today, even though the architectural plans for the house were approved by the Comstock Historic District Commission of the time. In her 2017 article, Lisa Gavon wrote of the house that “being inside is like walking in a giant sculpture: unexpected and aesthetically compelling. The light reverberates with a lyrical elegance across the triangular components, making the space continually magical.” Part of the magic is that the house has 4 large skylights.
Creating McCormick House: On Thanksgiving Day 1971, my husband’s parents, Jim and Sandy McCormick, moved their young family from a rental in Reno to the mountains of rural Silver City in Lyon County. They had purchased 5 acres of land in the historic Comstock area at a county property tax lien sale so they could build their own home.
Jim was an art professor at the University Nevada Reno, but took a 6 month sabbatical to work on the house. The family started out building the house with hand tools and no power, but eventually got a generator and power tools to finish the project.
A design fom Whole Earth Catalog inspired the home. My husband, Theo, recalls visiting some Buckminster Fuller designs in Colorado with his parents in the years before they built the dome house. He also remembers going to California with them to look at single dome structures (icosahedrons) being used by an Ananda Yoga center for yoga practice. The icosahedrons they saw used a method of binding center hubs together using metal strapping, which is what Jim did when he built McCormick House.
The Silver City house was completed by 1972. It consisted of one large dome, plus four icosahedrons and a slanted green house/ sun porch sort of structure on the east end.
House of Repurposed Materials: McCormick house is made partly with found objects and re-purposed materials. Some of the lumber for the siding was from a barn and house being torn down in Reno. The flooring for what is now the home library came from an historic Silver City house that was being torn down around 1971. A large window and a sliding glass door in the kitchen both came from philanthropist Moya Lear’s River House in Verdi (Lear was a family friend).
The large dome on the east end of the house, now used as an art studio, was originally a pipe and multi-colored plyboard structure made by UNR students and used on campus for art events. Jim brought it to Silver City around 1971 and students helped him reconstruct it on the east side of the property. It was eventually connected to the house by a hallway.
Jim McCormick chose the site for Mccormick House with the lovely views of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and the Pinenut Mountains in mind. This view from the deck is a favorite.
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