Lake houses present a particular design challenge: they need to function as vacation homes, which means they need to be easy and forgiving and somewhat impervious to the inevitable sand and wet and general enthusiasm that comes with that use. But they also need to feel considered — not like a rental, not like a storage unit for furniture that didn't fit anywhere else.
The lake house we worked on in northern Wisconsin had been in the family for decades and had accumulated layers of decisions made at different times and with different intentions. Our job was not to start over — that would have been wrong — but to make the layers coherent. To find the thread running through all of it and pull.
The thread turned out to be the view. Every room faces the water. Every furniture arrangement is oriented toward the windows. Every piece of art we introduced relates in some way to the natural world outside. It sounds obvious when you say it, but it took several months of looking at the house before we could see it clearly.
