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The home’s mudroom helps keep the family prepared for outdoor fun.

The large dining room table was custom made from reclaimed barn board.

The kitchen has plenty of room for guests to hang out while the host is cooking.

A monitor continually displays an assortment of family photos from a computer in the basement.

The home’s great room features comfortable, overstuffed furniture, perfect for casual entertaining. The iron tie-rods crafted by Mennonites hold the timber arches.

Beneath its comfortable, roomy style, the timber-frame home nestled near New Hampshire’s White Mountains on the shores of a western Maine lake contains a surprising level of sophistication. The high level of craftsmanship blended with natural details makes it spacious enough for friends and family without ever feeling overwhelming. Its custom technology allows homeowners to monitor systems from their home computer three hours away in northern Massachusetts and easily change light, music, and temperature settings all at the same time with the touch of one button.

With four kids ranging from ages 12 to 19, the homeowners often have a full house. “They entertain a lot of family and friends up there,” says builder Steve Howell of Howell Design & Build, “so it’s not unusual that they’d have 12 to 20 people staying in the house.

The homeowners hired Steve to build their year-round vacation home on the shores of a lake in western Maine, with views of the nearby White Mountains of New Hampshire, after working with him on their main house in northern Massachusetts. He remembers that at first the husband and wife had different visions of their future vacation home. While the wife wanted a smaller, traditional summer lake home, the husband wanted a larger, technologically-advanced vacation resort home. They compromised, building a grand timber-frame lodge, comfortable enough for family get-togethers yet—at 7,400 square feet—big enough to sleep, dine, and entertain a dozen or more.

At the beginning, Steve brought on board architectural designer Laine Jones of West Newbury, Mass., and they worked as a team on the home’s design along with structural engineer Ben Brungraber. That team included the homeowners, who were closely involved throughout the design and build process.

“It’s a collaborative thing so when the house is done there’s no surprises for the clients,” says Laine. “I’ll meet with people during the course of design and construction, so my clients are very much involved. I don’t believe in surprising them; I believe in over-explaining.”

Their first challenge in building was the landscape of the site. “The biggest issue with the site,” explains Laine, “is that it’s a very difficult site since it’s on the side of a steep, rocky hill.”

“Laine turned the issue of a steep, difficult site to an advantage by nestling the large home into the hillside,” Steve says. The “upside-down” design takes full advantage of the lakeside views. The house’s top floor contains the main living areas, including a great room, adjoining dining room, kitchen pantry, and large-screen porch, while the first floor level is home to the bedrooms and a recreation room for the kids.

They also made sure that the living areas extended to the great outdoors. “There’s almost 4,000 square feet of outdoor living area,” says Steve. Those spaces include open and screened porches, decks, patios, a bridge connecting the main house and carriage house, a curved stone tunnel to a boat storage area in the basement, a hot tub area, an outdoor fireplace, and a Swiss Family Robinson-style tree house for the kids.

And the surrounding beauty of the outdoors also made its way into the home’s design, which Laine describes as an Adirondack-style “heirloom house” with lots of natural materials, artistry, and craftsmanship incorporated throughout.

“I do a lot of shingle-style, lodge-style homes,” he explains. “It’s actually my favorite style because you can have a lot of fun and be whimsical. And wood is a lot of fun because it’s warm, and when you mix it with stone you really can’t go wrong.”

Stonemason Wayne Libby hand gathered the native Maine field stone used on the foundation on the home’s fireplaces. “He picks stone laying in walls and fields that still have lichen on them so right away when the house is done it has a real old-world feel,” says Steve. “The whole idea of the stone is to anchor the house to the site and give it a feeling of growing out of the landscape.”

Inside the open, post-and-beam framing gives the house “a tree-like experience,” says Steve. Bracing the 22-feet-high cathedral ceilings of the great room, timber arches are held together with mortise and tenon joinery and hand-hammered iron strap work made by Mennonite craftsmen in Pennsylvania, and fabricated in shops with no electricity by an unusual method: “The Mennonite blacksmiths connected the end of each iron tie-rod to the transmission of an old Ford pickup truck, geared down to turn at a slow speed with tremondous torque. They heated the rods up in place with acetylene torches and slowly twisted them,” explains Steve. “The trick was to keep the iron rod from twisting into a pretzel as it was turned, and they did this by dropping their toches and grabbing sledge hammers to pound them straight.”

“It was more nerve-wracking to those of us who knew this was the only 2-by-2 inch square rods to be found on the whole eastern seaboard, and we needed the rods the next day to assemble into the timberframe to make it from the scheduled ‘timber raising’ day,” says Ben Brungraber, who witnessed the operation.

Since the house is used for casual entertaining of family and close friends, the interior design is inviting and relaxed. “We used a lot of big upholstery,” says interior designer Carol Trubey. “They liked the idea of using sectionals so everybody could hang out together,” she says. Custom-made pieces include a large dining room table from a piece of reclaimed barn board so the family could seat their many guests, and a television cabinet in the master bedroom that raises the television up and down so that it is not a constant presence in the room.

Technologically speaking, the television cabinet is just the tip of the iceberg. Though the home’s style was inspired by an earlier era, it features the latest in automation, making it, as Steve calls it, “a total remote control house.”

“The beauty of the system is that it really integrates all the systems in the house into one unified system,” explains electrician Dean Fantini, who designed and installed the home’s automation.

Instead of having to drive to the three hours to Maine or depend on a neighbor to check the house and make sure the pipes don’t freeze over, the homeowners can simply monitor systems, such as climate control, lighting and status of the backup electrical generator from their home computer or laptop. “It plays a vital role in a vacation home,” he explains. “I think there’s a huge amount of functionality where everything can be controlled, monitored and really protected. Plus it’s energy efficient too.”

A convenient—and fun—aspect of the system is programmable macros, where you can adjust multiple settings at the touch of a button. A “bedtime” macro, for instance, may turn off certain lights and lower the thermostat—an energy saver when you have a large house that was previously filled with guests. A setting for “romantic dinner” could dim the lights, put on the some romantic tunes, and fire up the hot tub jets with one button.

Whatever the settings, the house is always inviting. And with its four fireplaces—three inside and one out—large dining room table, plenty of sleeping space—a large bunk room sleeps eight kids at a time—and close proximity to ski areas and miles of cross-country ski trails, it’s the perfect winter haven.

Design Details

Builder
Howell Design and Build, Inc

Architect
Laine Jones Design

Automation
Fantini Electric