Architecture & Architects

From the magazine, Home Plan Ideas
Here's a vacation home filled with color and light.

Cheerful Experience

Therese and Gary Martin's colorful, light-filled vacation home is a delight for the senses.

From its unusual shape to the kaleidoscope of color that changes from room to room, this 1,700-square-foot beach house is a cheerful experience for the Martins, their daughters, Cory and Cassie, and the friends and family members who go there to escape the daily grind.

The couple built their weekend retreat in Beachwalk, a lakefront community in Michigan City, Indiana, which is about a 20-minute drive from their home in northwestern Indiana. Therese and Gary fell in love with Beachwalk's quaint, casual ambience, and purchased a 50x125-foot homesite.

The Martins worked with Clark Streicher, a Michigan City builder who had built their primary residence, and Robert Orr, an architect from New Haven, Connecticut, who had designed other homes in Beachwalk. Orr calls the Martins' lap-sided house a boathouse cottage.

Maximum Views

Orr positioned the house on its narrow site for maximum water views. The main entry, which faces the lake, is on the side of the house at a 90-degree angle to the street. Its narrow, colonnaded veranda is about 20 feet long, longer than the average porch. Orr, a big believer in porches, also designed a screen porch off the family room and kitchen, with double doors and steps leading to the backyard and beach. There is a third, smaller porch at the other end of the entry hall. The porches and rear deck add about 450 square feet of living space.

Community guidelines allow only natural materials on exteriors, so Streicher used cedar siding and trim with two coats of stain to protect it from the elements. But there were no restrictions on exterior color, and Therese chose purple, her favorite, in a muted hue.

Better Homes and Gardens

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