in February | March 2025 | Rendering | Written by Laurel Delp | Photographed by Chuck Collier Schmidt
The three principals of Missoula, Montana-based Hone Architects + Builders have much in common. They grew up in families who built anything from sheds to shelves and houses from scratch. They’ve all been out in freezing weather working as timber framers. And all are into sports and the great outdoors.
Both Chris Chitty and Damian Mast quickly lost interest in higher education. Mast set out to be a wildlife biologist, assuming that would mean working outside. But it turned out to be mainly a statistics-collecting, tied-to-a-desk endeavor. Chitty studied engineering, but that wasn’t his passion — rock climbing was. He moved around a lot in his 20s and found carpentry was a good, portable way to make a living. (He and his wife moved to Missoula in 2008.)
Lucas Dupuis graduated summa cum laude with a Master of Architecture degree from Montana State University in Bozeman, but he was a bit disillusioned, and he, too, ended up framing houses for a couple of years. That is, until he became fed up with the hardships of the job and remembered he had a degree in architecture.
For a number of years, the three worked together periodically on an informal basis. “The group of rock-climbing carpenters in Missoula was small enough so that Damian and I just started working together fairly naturally,” says Chitty. Mast had opened his then one-man firm, Mast & Co. Builders, in 2006. By the time Chitty joined him as a partner in 2013, he had four employees.
Once he’d abandoned timber framing as a viable career, Dupuis worked at a local architecture firm but found the experience unsatisfying. At the height of the recession, he quit to open his own firm. His explanation? “I had a pass to Snowbowl (the local ski area),and I was done.
“I had the opportunity to be self-unemployed for a while,” Dupuis says with a laugh. “And that’s when I met Damian. So we were self-unemployed cohorts eking out a living.”
More importantly, he adds, “I’d always had a calling to build things myself. I’ve always wanted to know how things work.” He went on to open Sustainable Building Design, LLC, and occasionally designed homes for clients of Mast and Chitty. He also became a certified energy efficiency consultant and spent about 30 percent of his time educating other architects and builders on compliance and energy efficiency. His entire practice was focused on sustainability.
“So our reputations grew independently and somewhat intertwined as people in this area learned about us [and sought us out if they] wanted something unique, like a timber-frame or an energy-efficient house,” Dupuis says. “We were all interested in the same things. And I could be there in real-time and see what was working and what wasn’t, and that was satisfying. We ended up together in 2019 and said we should all be just one happy group and do it all together.”
The trio opened Hone Architects + Builders in 2020. Today, the firm consists of a staff of 15, including three architects, a project manager, and 10 carpenters, along with an office manager…