Lake House
This house, in Michiana Village on Lake Michican, was originally built in the 1940s and remodeled and enlarged in the years between 1962-3 and again in the mid-1980s.

The house and its addition comprise a modest, three-bedroom single storey wood framed cottage with a basement, situated in a quiet waterfront community.  The house is nestled among the conifers and hardwoods of the lake coastal woodlands, with northwest views of Lake Michigan and the region’s sensitive and protected overlapping parabolic dunes. Significant features of the house include its knotty pine interior paneling and its position relative to the dune topography between village and lake. Its spectacular connections to and views of the woodland landscape and lake make it a threshold between street and lake, village and beach.

While the region is considered by building codes to be in the “cold” classification, this region of the state of Michigan, known as the North Temperate Zone, is a “climate island” in the middle of the northern Midwest and is considered to have a generally milder climate, calling for building strategies normally found in temperate zones.

This project is a feasibility study for the renovation and expansion of the home, employing as many passive sustainable strategies as possible.  The study included employment of the Passivehaus Standard, re-use of as much of the house as possible, enhancing the connections between the house, the view corridor and the footpath towards the water, developing views of the lake from the ground level to the roof, protecting as many trees as possible, adhering to strict erosion control measures, and creating a site ecology by which the house and site function as a system.