Lake definition

Photography: Speckman Photography LLC and Cerys Fryczynski

TThroughout the years, the social atmosphere that has formed around northern Michigan’s vast network of beachy landscapes, forested pockets, and quaint towns has been forged by the inevitable calmness that typically befits vacation destinations. From the crooks of bays shaped by Lake Michigan’s more than 3,000 miles of shoreline to its chain of inland lake counterparts, the topography of northern Michigan is a broad playscape for making lasting memories, especially when custom-crafted legacy homes support them.

In northern Michigan, teams of expert builders and craftspeople transform residential investments and long-held dreams for lakeside living for their clients, delivering comfort and enduring architectural strength in high-end, custom homes. Two of these teams within the northern Michigan region, Mapleridge Construction LLC in Williamsburg and Miller, Poineau & Naumes Fine Home Builders, or MPN, in East Jordan, have leveraged their shared passion for the craft and experience in creating exceptional builds to bring their clients’ visions to reality. MPN, a full-service, high-end custom home builder, and its sister company, Mapleridge Construction, a custom home builder specializing in new construction and extensive renovation, are led by Scott Naumes, co-owner, and Chris Miller, co-owner and general manager. As a result, the teams have provided quality, custom residences across Michigan’s northern shorelines, from Grand Traverse Bay and Torch Lake to Charlevoix and Leelanau. It is on nearly two acres of Long Lake shoreline, just southwest of Traverse City and off the coast of Grand Traverse Bay in Harbor Springs, that two iconic pieces of custom-build-work by these firms can be found. The former is a graceful ode to midcentury influences, realized in horizontal forms of stone, wood, and glass, and interiors fitted for aging-in-place. The latter is a complex, transitional addition to the bay, dreamed by owners fond of Cape Cod aesthetics and a desire for a unique build.

Long Lake legacy Photography: Speckman Photography

On its roughly 1.7 acres and approximately 250 feet of shoreline, the Long Lake retreat is an elegant work of building and architecture, with a visual depth forged by its joining of shake, quarry stone, fresh-milled wood, and a serene

color palette mixing warm and cool. These characteristics are formed into architecture inspired early on by the sheltering forms of Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie style. The new build—which replaced an existing home onsite—offered the homeowners an opportunity to customize it to their liking.

“It’s a beautiful house. But, it’s a little bit different with the mix of the stone, stucco, and shake—it’s not your typical house,” said Scott Naumes, co-owner of Mapleridge Construction, which completed the custom build.

The building is foreshadowed by a long, curved drive running through the woods culminating in a generous expanse of stone pavers that catch excess runoff water. The gray stonework travels up to the low entry from the driveway where, just beyond, an intricate façade of multi-hued stone enters through stunning French doors made of textured glass and surrounded by a dark wood frame.

With its signature preparedness and experience in crafting beautiful works of architecture along Michigan’s northern coastlines,

Mapleridge Construction was an easy choice for the homeowners once it came time to find a builder. Mapleridge specializes in new construction and extensive renovations, enriching both processes with the ability of an 11,000-square-foot woodworking and paint shop that allows for exact specifications of interior and exterior details. As the title of custom homebuilder suggests, a large part of the Mapleridge process involves collaborating with the homeowners to make sure their visions are realized to their utmost potential.

“In the long run, for the homeowners, the more eyes that are on a project, the better the result will be,” Naumes said.

Particularly in lakefront homes, specifications and preferences can mean smaller details set the mood and atmosphere of the designed space. However, they often also run much deeper to understanding the relationship of the land and water with the architecture and the exact positioning of a residence to achieve the client’s ideal vantage point, which was the case for the Long Lake residence.

“Groundwater was an issue, so when building the site up, we positioned the house to take advantage of the views,” Naumes said. “That was the biggest challenge of the whole house really: getting it positioned and the elevation correct, so it wasn’t sticking out of the ground too tall for the homeowners.”

With review by the homeowners, the team had the site professionally staked and excavated to ensure the proper groundwater clearance before they raised it on a slightly shrunken foundation, striking a balance on the parcel. The raised setting also allowed for charming additions of textured quarry stone, which curve into retaining walls integrating down into the yard’s lake-facing slope.

The home sits as a grouping of horizontally oriented volumes that taper into a second floor and terrace, which overlooks the water. Together, its balanced stature and usage of low, hipped roofs with deep overhangs serving as patio coverage exude a calming manifestation of the modern prairie house. This design balance that Eric Mansuy, AIA associate and principal at G7 Design in Traverse City, surmised could be the most challenging part of the build.

“The clients love the outdoors, so a major objective was to create spaces that would flow between interior and exterior. This informed how the geometries of the home would develop,” Mansuy said. “The long horizontal lines, and deep overhangs, of the roof, visually extend the interior space to the outside, which is an element that repeats throughout the home. Even though this feature had its challenges, ultimately, I feel, it enhances the experience of the home.”

The long scale of the roof-forms also elongates the available living space outdoors. The second-floor balcony and its glass boundary—a prominent sight-saving design feature throughout the home—serves as a lakeside overlook up top and a shelter for the outdoor living on the patio below where the homeowners can arrange seasonal furniture.

Apart from creating a natural flow between indoor and outdoor living spaces, the horizontal nature of the home supports wide navigation-ways indoors to allow easy mobility as the homeowner’s age. The master bedroom is also on the main floor, and an elevator is integrated into the design for this same reason. Each bedroom has its own bathroom for privacy since the homeowners enjoy entertaining groups, and in the main entertainment area—and most other rooms—guests are always connected to a view of the water. The visual harmony of horizontal layers was also emphasized in the woodworking; perhaps the most substantial customized aspect of the build.

“Some of the key custom aspects resulted from the homeowners having some trees when they were preparing the lot that they had milled up in rough lumber, which they wanted to in some way incorporate back into the house,” Naumes said.

“We put together multiple-sized links of rough-sawn wood, cut it into smaller pieces like a puzzle, and put it together, so it was almost like a dry-laid stone, but made out of wood. There are four or five different colored stains, and it’s custom, one-of-a-kind, and specific to that house and job,” Naumes added.

Several other customized areas by Mapleridge appear throughout the home: in the wood organization units in the wine room, the kitchen’s built-in cove and countertop

inlay; the fireplace’s slab top; and a bar countertop toward the dining room, as well as a key-drop area in the mudroom composed of leftover planks. The team also got involved in building templates for a custom-fabricated stairway handrail that was crafted offsite and then later installed.

Among its many abilities, Mapleridge offers services like finish carpentry, stonework, stairway, handrail, and furniture design and fabrication. With the ability to navigate and manage this additional work when building a home, the Mapleridge team takes pleasure in investigating the possibilities or difficulties that often arrive in unison with the job. In all, its comprehensive and deeply enjoyed approach to the craft of building makes the team an asset for the rest of the design-andbuild network tasked with bringing home from initial sketch to turn-key solution.

“It was a great experience. I’ve been fortunate to work with many top builders in the area, and I would put [Mapleridge] on that list without a doubt. They’re great with communication and appreciate the importance of the details, which is something we look for,” Mansuy said.

Bayside transitional Photography: Cerys Fryczynski

On a bluff along Little Traverse Bay, another distinctive residence sits as a new fixture on the Michigan shoreline to the northeast. From the home, a distant point of land is visible along with Petoskey just beyond. Thanks to its transitional design favoring more shallow rooms, each main area offers a vista of the bay and its activity. The home fills the spatial footprint of its predecessor, with two bedrooms in the primary residence and a separate carriage house holding a guest suite for added privacy and lodging.

The three-bedroom, one-bunk-room home harbors a unique architectural program designed by Frederick Ball of Frederick Crosley Ball Associates in Harbor Springs, alongside stonework by Northern Michigan Stoneworks Inc., landscaping by Richard Hoffman Landscaping Inc., and landscape architecture by Maureen Parker, owner of Common Ground Landscapes. The program harnesses the homeowners’ appreciation for Cape Cod-style homes, but with a transitional edge in its northern Michigan habitat.

“There’s nothing in that house that is typical,” Ball said. “There is this cottage vocabulary in Harbor Springs that bloomed over [one] hundred years, but with most of the houses, [clients] bring their architects with different visions for what the house is. This one, I think, is a fusion of old and new cer-

tainly. I didn’t want it to look like the rest of the homes; it has a lot of the same elements, but those elements are all different.”

The elements are illustrated in several aspects of the home, from the mixture of exposed or panel-wrapped roof trusses in fresh white or natural tones, and the breezeway between the home and garage, to its custom built-in stone fireplace for cooking and circular steel light fixture. Materials from the regional area appear throughout the residence in new places and applications, leaving many delightful details to explore the more time is spent in or outdoors.

With architecture that thoroughly explored—and defined—a relationship between the traditional cottage and transitional vernacular , it required an apt builder to deliver a finely executed final product, which led to the collaboration with the custom-building team of MPN.

“Anything [Ball] does has extreme detail; it’s going to be a one-of-a-kind piece of art with a ton of detail, and that’s what we’re all about,” said Chris Miller, co-owner and general manager of MPN. “It truly brings out the best of our company and our team if we can do something unique and custom. It really shows off our talents and abilities as a custom home builder.”

Part of the homeowners’ attraction to MPN was the team’s in-house woodworking abilities and talented team of craftspeople, who could achieve the design’s complex woodworking elements, particularly the extensive use of mitered, nickel-gap paneling throughout the interior.

On the exterior, more custom details comprise the flair in the siding and soffit work, and integrations of different roof styles, from hipped to arched, in Alaskan yellow cedar. The overlapping of the roof design results in a complex meeting of forms and shapes that create a fluid, elegant visual style while exemplifying the skill required to achieve them. The team at MPN also made custom corbels to cap each flair detail on the windows for another charming characteristic on the fresh white exterior.

“The exterior detailing is so beautifully designed with so much going on that it was exceptional craftsmanship to make that exterior come together. There’s so many trim details, corbels, flair details, and crowns; you normally don’t have that amount of detail inside and out,” Miller said.

Inside, the framing created a pointed, vaulted ceiling on the second floor that attracted the owners, resulting in keeping the shape and finishing it in the mitered, poplar-panel-work that wraps most interior rooms. In the second bedroom of the main home, the pointed-ceiling is exchanged for a unique barrel-vaulted design finished in natural cypress wood for a textured

accent against white walls and furnishings. The cypress also appears underneath the customized breezeway that connects the main house and guesthouse; here, it composes another vaulted ceiling with exposed geometric beam shapes which shelter the stone cooking fireplace.

“The most difficult part to execute was how the exterior combines with the interior in those details and having those two areas speak to each other,” Ball said. “The interior features columns, detailing, and coves that are mimicked on the outside, bringing those elements together in an exciting way.”

White oak floors are found throughout the interior’s open floor plan and living quarters, and they anchor several structural or stylistic features that appear first on the exterior. Elegantly flared columns and siding, structural portions formed by curved stones, and gridded ceiling inlays in the living areas match the panes of several window transoms. Additional metal details custom fabricated by Toledo-based, metal-crafter Greg Melms, feature extensively throughout the home, in the metal baluster collars, newel post caps, and even the balcony.

Together with these custom details, those crafted by the MPN team form a cohesive build that is as strong constructively as it is decoratively, from custom cabinetry, vanities, and bookshelves down to the precisely mitered interior siding that ensures each wall shape formed by the architecture specifically meets the next in harmony.

“When you have that many details on a drawing and you are in the field, to try to make them all come together naturally, it can be a huge challenge,” Miller said. “[With] that tongue-and-groove, there’s no trim pieces. It’s all just beautifully crafted and mitered together, and that starts at a great framing contractor that framed it perfectly and then exceptional trim carpentry to make it all come together seamlessly and beautifully.”

It is the result of an extensive team effort in finalized residences such as these, where homeowners investing in dream lakefront experiences, boundary-pushing designers, and teams of contractor-artisans pool their resources to create lakefront properties that define the new legacies of their shorefronts.

“It was wonderful, because everybody involved took this to heart. It was a labor of love, and sometimes that doesn’t happen,” Ball said. “Everybody, the artisans, from the masons up to the roofers, seemed to take this to heart and realize it was something special, which made it extra rewarding to watch the entire project evolve from dream to reality.”