This 1700sf building serves as a multi-purpose outbuilding to our clients’ larger vacation house on Lake Winnipesaukee. Storage of boats, snowmobiles, and sporting equipment forms the core of the program. Though subordinate in this way to the main house, this building occupies a separate residential lot across the road. For that reason, the program was enlarged with living space to support the parcel’s market value. The result expands the family’s capacity for hospitality on big weekends, serves other times as a kind-of clubhouse for their college-aged sons, and could someday be a fully autonomous dwelling for rent or sale.

 

Using some of the language and many of the same materials as the main house (which responds to long and sweeping views over the lake), our Carriage House / Bunk House responds to its densely wooded site with a distinctly expressed verticality. Over three large garage bays the bedrooms, kitchen, and dining space occupy the steeply pitched roof volume. A double-story great hall connects living quarters to the ground plane and the woods beyond and amplifies the sensory richness of vertical circulation. Use of the upstairs living space invites inhabitants into a close and varied set of relationships to the roof forms and structural elements and an emphatic sense of the shelter they provide. Large windows subordinate the human scale to that of the woods outside. Vertically stacked windows in the great hall frame views of tall white pines. Interior and exterior material and color palates help the forms and experience represent a certain ideal of Lakes Region living with a sort-of nourishing nostalgia. It’s all meant to shape for inhabitants having left the lake, a sense they have found a warm and safe refuge here in the woods.

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Jury Comments:

"The Carriage House design exemplifies a harmonious blend of architectural innovation and contextual sensitivity, deserving of a Merit Award. Its sectional organization cleverly integrates a glassy two-story entry and great room, juxtaposed to private sleeping areas situated the expansive garage. The deliberate verticality of the structure mirrors the dense woodland setting with hints to the historic main house, while large windows and vertically stacked openings in the 'great hall' frame majestic views of towering white pines, merging interior and exterior spaces. The whole reads modestly in scale and footprint from the exterior.

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Crafted from granite, cedar, Douglas fir, and bold painted trim, the material palette evokes a timeless essence reflective of the Lakes Region, and the pine forest in which it is sited. It stands as a testament to thoughtful design, where every detail-from steep roof pitch and fir structural elements-embodies the essence of a warm, nurturing retreat nestled in the northern woods." 

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​​Studio InSitu Architects, Inc: Tim Hess, Joshua LaLiberte, Alex McManus

Engineers, Civil: Ames Associates

Engineers, Structural: LALA Associates, Kanayo Lala Principal

General Contractor: Mike Logel Builder
 

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