Reorienting a Home to Its Lake

Transforming a two-story summer home on a steeply sloped site over Candlewood Lake in New Milford, Connecticut, into a year-round primary residence meant expanding the home, while opening it up to capture more light and intensify its relationship with the seasonal spectacle of the lakefront. The resulting home merges dramatic interior living space with the landscape using local, authentic materials and carefully choreographed transparency to connect the lived experience of the house with the place that inspires and defines it.

Lake Life

The existing home, built in the mid-20th century, was a modest self-contained gable structure, passively neutral to its spectacular surroundings and its privileged site. INTERSTICE Architects began from the premise that the home needed to be more than a house beside a lake—it needed to be a true expression of lakeside dwelling: it had to respond to its place in celebration of the rituals and daily experiences of New England lake life. Calling for an architecture that is in stronger dialogue with the exterior, the house needed to be more porous, yet protective, providing sweeping views both horizontally and vertically of its surroundings. From the upper canopy of the surrounding trees, down to the shoreline and the shimmering water below, the reimagined home engages the changing light, movement, and color of its setting.

Exploring Ma

The layering and interweaving of space-time and becoming is best summed up in the Japanese spatial and temporal concept of ma. Guiding our design approach for the lake house spatial experience, this concept is demonstrated in the enfolding of interior space with the exterior world. The entry is where interior and exterior fuse and blur. This pivotal experience of the house orients the interior space and is a point of juxtaposition. A glass entry vestibule fans out from the main volume of the house, allowing the slope-side garden paving stones to flow seamlessly inwards at a slightly lower level than the main living spaces of the house. This gives the arrival experience a moment of pause and repose, between interior and exterior, before one steps up onto the warm hardwood floors of the home. Just within is the open stairway which occupies the transparent center of the home, an in-between space, that interconnects all three levels of the house, from office and studio lofts above, to the lower garden patio level facing the lake. The bright and social stairway allows light to penetrate deep into the structure.

Lake and Sky

To “wake up and see only the lake and sky,” to always have a place to put everything away, and to experience the great reveal of the lake through the house, upon entry and “in every room,” were client aspirations expressed in the design brief. Walls that previously prevented the free flow of movement were removed, expanding spaces and merging volumes. New volumes are added to store vehicles, provide office space, and additional bedrooms, in a constant effort to reframe the lake and views to the forest landscape and garden. Roofs are lifted upwards in response to the slope, and the house is reconfigured so that volumes cascade down towards the shoreline. The main circulation is organized to be transparent to the landscape, allowing interior spaces to interact and connect along a central three-story space bathed in natural light.

An Oasis Within

The master suite is designed to be an enclosed oasis within the house, a private sanctuary from guests at the heart of the home with ample closets, a private study, and a spacious bathroom. Glass and wood are used in floor to ceiling planes—a wall of glass facing southwest creates a uniquely intimate relationship with the lakefront and allows the bedroom sweeping views that descend to the lakeshore below, a year-round vista that changes seasonally.

A Slice of Sky

A continuous ribbon of skylights unfurls from the entry vestibule over to the great room, across the open kitchen to descend toward the lakefront façade, two stories down to the lower patio. The slice of light provides a dramatic interior experience of the landscape, and the sun’s rays transect across these connected spaces. The great room, combining all social functions—cooking, dining, living—is unified by the clients’ extensive indoor greenery collection displayed and fostered within the new open and naturally-lit space.

 

• Residential