The American lakehouse occupies a special place in the country’s architectural canon. Not because of water skiing or tubing or barbecues, but as a site of teenage debauchery. Think about it — American Pie, Wet Hot American Summer, the beginning of pretty much every Friday the 13th film — all involve teens flocking to a lakehouse or lake-adjacent property to blow off some steam, maybe get lucky and hopefully not get grounded (or killed).

It’s this that we have in mind when we initially visit our client’s 60s era abode on the shores of Stockbridge Bowl. The property possessed all the accoutrements you would want from a lakehouse of this vintage - knotty pine paneling, sloped rooflines, exposed live-edge trusses, a certain higgledy-piggledyness emphasized by the faint odor of mold. It’s love at first sight, and we begin to construct a narrative based on an alternate reality where the dufus we all knew in high school who threw parties at his parents lake house now lives in it and somehow has interesting taste.

The clients are in love with MASSMoCA, so much they got married there, as well as the classic Sunnylands estate in Palm Springs. So we begin to shroud the whole place in a kind of Sol-Lewitt graphicness with key bursts of color that feel somewhere between James Turrell and The Brady Bunch. Peter Harnden and his frequent collaborator Lanfranco Bombelli also become a major reference point. 

We paint the Reform kitchen cabinets in a not-quite-olive green and give them chunky, oversized wooden handles. Volker Haug sconces with concentric circles hover over a camel-colored zellige backsplash that helps the space feel not-too-pristine. Opposite the kitchen, we install a Malm Stove and a cantilevered loveseat with firewood underneath, a detail we yank directly from a Harnden project. For the media room, we get inspired by old executive suites and clad the space all-over in a plaid by Annie Coop that feels vintage-inspired but not locked in time. The back bath we cover in a zellige tile in a nostalgic green, but something about it feels a little too sharp, so we add 3 horizontal lines of a darker green tile in a different format.

Our clients are so pleased with the designs that they’ve asked us to work on their landscape as well.