LAKE HOUSE
DOOR COUNTY, WI
Under Construction
Located in a forested site along Lake Michigan, the Lake House shares a similar context to La Dallman’s earlier Pavilion House. The house is designed for a large, close-knit family who had two requests: to create privacy in the sleeping quarters and to reuse salvaged material from the site’s previous structure – a modest cottage that held sentimental value but had become increasingly unfit for the needs of the extended family. The resulting massing is defined by separate bedroom suites embedded within a larger plinth of communal living space – a strategy that draws from the nearby Pavilion House designed by LA DALLMAN Architects a few years earlier. While both houses have a conglomeration of truncated pyramidal forms, the Lake House departs from the planar organization of the Pavilion House by introducing sectional variation. Appearing to coalesce organically, this volumetric arrangement is partly due to a peculiar lakefront zoning constraint where the site’s preceding structure informs the permissible developable volume for the house.
On the ground floor, the connective tissue that encompasses the living, dining, kitchen and mudroom entrance features the pyramidal ceilings and oculi first conceived at the Pavilion House. The intersection of the bedroom suites within the plinth imposes sectional differences that zone the ground floor plan into an interconnected series of functional communal spaces, aided by the detailing of built-in furniture and cabinetry. The functional segregation between the plinth and bedroom suites is registered materially – the plinth features exposed cast concrete, flagstone, dark wood paneling and salvaged field stone, while the bedroom suites are clad in cedar shingles – an ode to the barn structures that dot Wisconsin’s agricultural landscape and the rock outcroppings that feature in the surrounding geomorphology. This locally sourced material palette celebrates the craft and context of the region, while lending itself to reinforce the intersectional qualities of the Lake House.