LOCATION: MAHOPAC, NY
TYPE: RESIDENTIAL
STATUS: 2024
CLIENT: PRIVATE CLIENT
TEAM: AMANDA SCHACHTER, ALEXANDER LEVI, DUGAN LUNDAY
CONSULTANTS: RESREAL DESIGNS, TOM FARAONE ENGINEERING
CONTRACTING: GEYER CONSTRUCTION INC
FABRICATORS: RCJ WELDING & FABRICATING LLC
On a wooded quarter-acre site along the banks of a Putnam Valley lake in New York State’s Croton Watershed, the Kirk Lake House fits sustainably atop the foundations of a 1920’s hunting cabin for a growing multigenerational family. To preserve embodied energies of excavation and ecosystems, we expanded the lake house volume vertically over the original foundations, cantilevering over the existing perimeter to gain square footage while leaving the lakefront habitat untouched.
Nestled between a rocky outcropping and the lake under a canopy of trees, the house takes on distinct profiles between land and water. The dirt road, arriving from the east, curves towards the front entrance, a spare arrangement of windows floating in a reserved façade of blue cedar siding. A New England saltbox cantilevers off the second floor with a cedar-slat shed tucked beneath it, a window reaching out sideways to look back at the lake.
Facing the water to the west, the house opens up, engaging the lake at several levels. Over shorefront rocks at the first floor, an open-air cedar shower box cantilevers off the facade, outdoor steps descending to deck and dock.
The second floor begins with a series of double-height loft-bedrooms that proceeds to an unfurling sequence of social spaces, from intimate to expansive, in the spirit of a Roman bathhouse: a steam-shower, sauna, den, and cloud-space, culminating in a cantilevered outdoor hot-tub terrace that looks out onto the lake.
The tight embrace of the humid tile steam shower and dry wood sauna give way to the outstretched horizons of the cloud-space net hovering transparently over the dining room, as buoyant and weightless as the water’s surface beyond. Here, in the cloud-space with continuous windows looking out to the lake, the surface tension of the water becomes a social space, the feeling of buoyancy spiraling out from inner mind and body to a heightened extraction of the essence of the experience of the lake amidst expanded field of the environment. Stepping outside beyond the cloud-space to the heated water of the giant cantilevered hot-tub terrace, the lake itself becomes the final giant room in the sequence, reconnecting back in an immense play of scale of bounced surface reflections of sky and fluttering leaves that brings the infinite expanse of the outdoors back into the house.
