ENJOY: Design

How Locals Live 

We love looking at fancy homes, but you don’t need a multi-million-dollar home to live well in Jackson Hole.

// By maggie theodora

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2023—the most recent year for which statistics are available—there were 13,906 housing units in Teton County. Residents of four especially unique examples of these opened their doors to us, sharing not only their spaces, but why they love them.

“I love it here, and I feel very lucky to live here,” says Tracy Lamb about the dairy barn her grandfather George Lamb built in the 1920s and she has lived in since 1998. “I wake up to hand-hewn, hand-scraped logs in my bedroom, and I’m just like, ‘thanks grandpa.’” 

It was a working barn for the first several decades of its life, but when it belonged to Lamb’s parents, they used it as a storage space. Just as Lamb was moving to Seattle to begin her adult life (“I felt like I had to get out of Jackson; the best thing a girl raised in a small town can do is try a city,” she says), her dad, who was on the Jackson Town Council and also the Teton County Historic Preservation Board, began converting the barn into a space habitable for humans. Insulation and walls were added, the dirt floor was replaced, and the building was put on a foundation. On the alley between Pearl Avenue and Simpson Street—what Lamb says is a “quiet, often overlooked neighborhood,” despite it being only several blocks from the Town Square—the former barn was continuously inhabited by renters until several months after Lamb moved back to Jackson in 1998.

“I couldn’t find a place to live because I had a cat,” she says. “But then, surprisingly, the couple living here at the time wanted to move. I asked my parents if I could rent it from them at the market rate. I didn’t want any favors. So that’s how I got in here. It was such a mess, but I was so lucky.” 

The former barn was continuously inhabited by renters until several months after Lamb moved back to Jackson in 1998.

Lamb wasn’t around to help her dad when he remodeled the barn in the late 1970s, but she tackled its late 1990s remodel with gusto. “The screens were busted, there were lots of holes in the walls, it was dark—it had all of the stuff that my dad had put in 20 years before,” she says. Lamb painted everything and replaced the windows and floor but kept the avocado green kitchen counters.

Having now been in the barn for more than 25 years, Lamb says, “it’s just got so much character.” The first floor has a “teeny, tiny” guest room, the primary bedroom, Lamb’s studio—she is an artist and retired from a career as a graphic designer several years ago—and a washer and dryer. Upstairs the kitchen opens to the living room; a loft overlooks this space. Everywhere are mementoes and a lot of what Lamb calls “eye candy,” because “I can get pretty bored visually sometimes,” she says.

This isn’t the only log building Lamb’s grandfather built. He was one of the craftsmen who built the Chapel of the Transfiguration in Grand Teton National Park (read more about this chapel, which celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2025, on page 56). He also built the barn, in which horses are still kept, in what is today May Park, off Rancher Street in East Jackson. “When my grandparents owned it, it was Palomino Acres. They raised horses there and eventually sold it to the May family,” she says. The hardware store/lumberyard her grandfather, and then father, owned and ran for decades is long gone but was on the block where Annie’s Thai Kitchen and the office of Dr. Bruce Hayse is now.

Courtney and Chad Jakubowski decided to move to Jackson Hole from Seattle while on a 2013 camping trip in Yellowstone. “We got back to Seattle, put in our two weeks’ notice, sold most of our stuff, and packed the rest into a little sedan with our dog and were in Jackson for [Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s annual autumn] job fair,” Courtney says. They rented a room by the month at a hotel in downtown Jackson. “We were just going to be here for a winter, so the hotel was great—it had furniture and they cleaned it once a week,” Courtney says.More than a decade later, the couple is still in the valley and still working for JHMR, but they’ve had some big changes: they are now parents to Zadie, 4, and Zoe, 2, and, in 2022, the family moved into a three-bedroom, 1,259-square-foot Habitat for Humanity Home in Teton Village. Chad says, “I feel like we hit the lottery many times over with the way our house came together.” Courtney adds, “It’s really nice to have something that is ours and to be able to put a nail in the wall and not feel like we’re going to need to cover it up before we move out.”

While it was the fenced yard—for their dogs—that Courtney was initially most excited about, they’ve come to love most everything about the house. “The four years before we got this place, we rented a small log cabin that was one big room with a loft, so this place having rooms and doors and lots of natural light feels incredible,” Courtney says. “I really love the light in the downstairs and how the kitchen is open to where the girls play.”

And then, of course, is the fact that one of the best ski resorts in the country, which also happens to be where their offices are and where the girls are in daycare, is a five-minute walk away. “Our commute being so nice and easy is a big benefit,” Courtney says. “And, although it’s a small window, our guest room looks out at the resort.”

“Snowboarding and friends,” 32-year-old roommates Kevin Dehm and Cameron Walters answer simultaneously when asked about how they met. “Kevin and one of my good friends were living in a sketchy house on Simpson. I’d go over there and hang out, and Kevin was there,” says Walters, who was born and raised in East Jackson (in the East Ridge subdivision, close to the many trailheads of Cache Creek). The two live with a third roommate and Walters’s dog, Scarlett, in a two-story 2,760-square-foot rental house built in 2018 in East Jackson. 

Walters, who bounced between Salt Lake City and Jackson for several years after college (depending on jobs and housing), has been in this rental for the longest of the group (about five years). “I had been in a janky place for a while—it was like $600 a month for a room—and had friends that were in this place, which I just thought was so nice. When one of them moved out, I kind of just begged, ‘please help me get out of the janky place.’ And they let me,” he says. One reason this place is so nice? Scarlett is allowed. “The only thing was that she had to meet [the landlord’s] dogs, and they got along fine,” says Walters, who works in maintenance at the Jackson Hole Airport. Another reason? Each of the three bedrooms has its own bathroom. “That just makes a huge, huge deal,” Walters says. There’s also a creek through the backyard in the summer that the men can hear running if they leave their windows open.

Dehm, who lived in the sketchy Simpson house—“It had been a ski bum house for a long, long time, and it just hasn’t seen any help in, like, 30 years,” he says—for five years, sublet one of the three bedrooms in Walters’s place a couple of summers ago when its usual tenant was down in Colombia. “I loved living here,” he says. “It was an opportunity to be in a much better place.” Dehm, who had seasonal jobs for years and now works for a custom cabinetry company, moved out when his sublease was up but let it be known that he’d love to be on the lease if the opportunity ever came up. That happened last summer. “I feel very lucky to have come upon this house,” he says. “We have space to all hang out, and it’s big enough to host dinners. We love to cook and have people over all the time.”

Steph (Fellows) Wise, who lived in the valley from 2009–2013, got the job that allowed her to move to back to Jackson—with her husband, Dustin Wise—in 2021 through a friend of a friend. “One of my friends from when I had lived in Jackson ran into [a principal of GYDE Architects] in the Whole Foods parking lot and told him about me,” says Fellows, who, at that time, was the overworked operations director at an architecture firm in San Luis Obispo, California, overseeing 40 employees and three offices remotely during the pandemic. Fellows has now been operations director at GYDE Architects since June, 2021.

The couple found their first rental apartment in Jackson through another friend of a friend. Their current home, a 1,400-ish-square-foot, three-bedroom house in Cottonwood that was built in 1988 and fully remodeled right before they moved in? Yup, they also found that through a friend of a friend. “If you know somebody, it is ten times easier to find a place,” Fellows says.

Knowing people in the community didn’t help the couple when they tried to buy a house, though. “During our first four months living here, we put six offers in,” Fellows says. “It was that crazy, crazy time when everything was so inflated and people were putting in offers sight unseen. It was insane, but it was what was happening. We were discouraged. If we hadn’t found the place we’re in now and a reasonable landlord, I don’t think our lives would be the same. Ultimately, how awesome would it be to own a place here? Becoming house poor and having to change our lifestyle entirely for a three-bedroom house that’s $1.6 million isn’t something we want or can do.”

If you know somebody, it is 10 times easier to find a place.”

—Steph Fellows

The couple, who had their first baby, Cooper, in November 2023, still owns their home in San Luis Obispo. “We rent it out to doctors and nurses exclusively,” Fellows says. “If we’re not there, then we want to make sure that someone who is giving back to the community is in it.” In Jackson, they make sure to be involved with and give back to our community. They were certified as foster parents in early 2023. Wise, who runs a video production company and was a Division I swimmer, has coached the Jackson Hole Stingrays club swim team. Fellows teaches yoga at Inversion and is a volunteer on the Town of Jackson’s Planning Commission and Board of Adjustments.

While Cooper wasn’t born until after they had been in Jackson for a couple of years, the anticipation of kids was a reason they moved to the valley. “The pandemic happened, and we had the time to think about our future in a way we hadn’t before, and we decided that California wasn’t the place we wanted to raise a family,” Fellows says. An unexpected benefit of Fellows volunteering on a town board is that Cooper can be in the town’s daycare. “Town is really trying to make it more long-term feasible for its employees to stay here,” Fellows says. “I have not found another community that matches what you give to it more than Jackson does.”

Wise says, “We’re not only here for ourselves any more, but also for Cooper. It is our dream to have him grow up in Jackson.” JH