apw house - charlevoix, michigan
The APW House is a private residence nestled along the wooded shoreline of Northern Michigan’s Lake Charlevoix. In a deliberate departure from the area’s prevalent typology of lake homes—often bulky, visually impervious multi-story buildings detached from their surroundings—this project was conceived as a linear, low-slung structure sitting parallel to the water’s edge. Approaching the house on a rugged gravel drive winding through the forest, the APW House gradually emerges into view, a simple, decidedly horizontal bar building composed of a series of solid wood boxes and glazed voids that offer intermittent glimpses of the shoreline beyond. Solids and voids are tied together by a thin, continuous roof plane that folds up at the northern end of the building to cradle an elevated observatory with expansive views into the landscape.
A paved path leads visitors into a light-filled entry vestibule, which connects to the home’s social epicenter, a large open space for cooking, dining, and gathering that is anchored by a central, four-sided fireplace. A slightly recessed, carefully articulated wood plane stretches across the ceiling and connects the kitchen on one end with a wall of built-in cabinetry on the other, adding tactility and warmth to the otherwise muted interior palette dominated by concrete, blackened steel, and white walls. Continuous sixty-foot-long glass walls run the entire length of the living hall, offering sweeping vistas of lake and forest, and allowing the inside to spill out effortlessly onto the adjacent lakeside terrace. In the summer, the large lift-slide doors on both sides essentially turn the living hall into an open-air pavilion, providing a high degree of cross-ventilation that makes mechanical conditioning in the summer virtually unnecessary.
Grouped together beneath the continuous roof plane, three wood boxes at the south end of the building house the garage and two small bedroom suites, along with utility and closet spaces. The center box is partially pulled out from the main roof perimeter, thus forming an intimate lakeside courtyard shared by the two bedrooms. At the opposite end of the house, open-riser stairs lead to the only upper-level room of the house, the generously glazed observatory that looks out over Lake Charlevoix and the colorful vegetated roof covering the building. Two additional bedroom suites occupy the elongated wood box tucked under the observatory; the box extends laterally as an oblong volume that spatially defines the sides of lake terrace and east lawn, respectively.
The precisely detailed exterior envelope of the APW House combines high-performance glazing systems and wall assemblies with superior insulation values. Dark-stained thermally modified poplar siding was chosen for its long-term durability, dimensional stability, and biological resistance against micro-organisms and insects. The poplar siding, installed as a ventilated rainscreen, borrows its muted shade from the monochrome trunks of the surrounding forest, allowing the body of the house to visually amalgamate with its natural background. The building’s extensive green roof, composed of hardy plants and succulents chosen to thrive in Northern Michigan’s harsh climate, reduces the structure’s heat island potential, further increases the envelope’s thermal performance, and minimizes stormwater runoff. Remaining stormwater is diverted into the vegetated raingarden embedded in the lakeside patio, where it can slowly percolate into the ground.