The Most Beautiful House in the World

Tom Olivo built the house that changed his life -- from 1,200 miles away.

How Tom Olivo built the house that changed his life.

In Tom Olivo's dream house you can pretty much pick a window and name the mountain range. The triple-level windows below the cathedral ceiling of the great room frame the Gallatin Range. Through the kitchen window the snowcapped Bridger Mountains loom close enough to tilt your head back. From the Jacuzzi in the master bedroom the view stretches 40 miles to the Tobacco Root Mountains. The dining room looks out on the Madison Range and the Beartooth Mountains in the Absaroka Range.

"If I ever take this for granted, there's something wrong with me," says Olivo, who adds that he occasionally pinches himself to make sure he's not still merely imagining his fantasy home.

In the giant mountain-rimmed bowl that is Bozeman, Mont., Olivo's four-year-old house sits on five foothill acres at 5,000 feet above sea level, partway up the eastern side of the bowl. Olivo looks down on propeller planes circling to land at a private airstrip and marvels at approaching storms that sweep in over the Continental Divide, convulsing the sky. A neighboring rancher's wheat spreads like a giant comforter over the land, just 200 feet from his bedroom. But even better than the views is what lured Olivo to the area: the trout fishing down in the valley. Abundantly blessed with spring-fed creeks and snowmelt-coursing streams and rivers, Bozeman is arguably the fly-fishing capital of America. By the end of August, Olivo had already stepped into his waders some 35 times for the year. He's not retired -- just determined enough and shrewd enough to hook himself nearly every entrepreneur's fantasy -- raising his children and living the good life year-round in a picture-postcard setting far from the madding crowd.

The 44-year-old Olivo built his 5,300-square-foot home on time and on budget. Even more noteworthy, he did so from 1,204 miles away, in San Diego, where he was establishing a management-consulting firm called Success Profiles Inc. A former NCAA champion diver and top diving coach, Olivo moved his family and business to Montana the same way he achieved success in sports: by beginning with the end in mind and visualizing how to get there.

But even the forward-planning Olivo hadn't visualized all the ways his original goal would alter his life.

That particular goal -- a house in prime fly-fishing country -- first entered his mind after his wedding in 1989 but really can be traced back to his childhood in Bedford Hills, N.Y., a pastoral part of Westchester County. Olivo shouldered his first fishing rod at age 4. By the time he was 8, his parents let him head off alone to a nearby reservoir to fish. He loved the freedom of coming and going and the pleasure of one "final" cast after another as the sun set. He was hooked for life. But it was when he and his wife, Katie, a lover of the outdoors, honeymooned in New Zealand, a fly-fishing mecca that boasts many of the planet's most prized trout streams, that Olivo realized the depth of his passion for angling.

The Olivos' notion back then was to build a getaway place, a vacation home in the mountains, close to great fishing. They considered Flagstaff, Ariz., and Boulder, Colo., but fell in love with Bozeman on their first visit there, in 1991. Before flying back to California, they purchased the five-acre site of their future home. During that same visit, Olivo drew a floor plan of their dream home on a piece of graph paper. The final design of the home is virtually identical to that original sketch, right down to the old recycled beams the Olivos bought from a local company called Big Timberworks.

While the Olivos didn't change the original design of their home by much, their designs on their home would be greatly altered. The reason? The way that two births affected their lives.

The first was the birth of Tom Olivo's company, which grew out of his job as a personal financial planner at the Equitable. When a number of clients started asking him to help them with their businesses, Olivo discovered he enjoyed that work much more than his day job. Each client company had its own dynamics and problems, and he found those puzzles infinitely more challenging than estate planning. So in late 1990, while still with the Equitable, he launched Success Profiles and spent the first couple of years identifying key business-performance diagnostic measures and learning how to assess them. Then in 1992 his first daughter, Sarah, was born. Thinking back to his own childhood, Olivo couldn't help wishing that his daughter might experience the kinds of outdoor adventures and the freedom he'd enjoyed, for he knew only too well the shortcomings of their home in highway-jumbled Southern California.

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