The idea was that the forty-some-year-old, 800-square-foot log cabin on Second Street in Wilson would become a playroom for the Hoyt family’s two kids, ages three and seven. But now that there’s a 1,600-square-foot addition—most of it a new second story—that has an open kitchen/dining/living area flooded with sunlight and with views down onto Fish Creek, the kids have mostly forgotten the cabin that until Christmas 2013 was their home.

Hoyt’s thinking—applying a contemporary structure to an existing one of an older style—isn’t new, although there are few, if any, purposeful examples of it to be seen in Jackson Hole. Such additions are called parabuildings: modern ticks on a postmodern host.