Omena House
LAKE EFFECT
Sustainable design means working with nature instead of against it. Why shut out breezes and let in the full heat of the sun and then install air conditioning? DF&A’s approach to designing a fully sustainable lake house was to begin with common sense and an awareness of the site, and then to augment nature’s gifts with innovative high-tech solutions. The result, featured in Architecture Daily, was the first private residence in Northern Michigan to achieve LEED-gold certification.
TEMPERATURE: CONTROLLED
Omena House was an early adopter of in-ceiling hydronic radiant heating and cooling system. There’s no traditional forced air HVAC, just a geothermal-powered, thermally-active ceiling that can both heat and cool the house. But only when needed. Most of the time, the Ipe-clad rain screen that covers much of the façade keeps the sun from overheating the house, and the fully operable NanaWall in the main living space channels lake breezes to provide all the passive cooling that’s required.
The essence of lake house life: a seamless convergence of outside and in.
Fifteen years after DF&A was hired to design a lake house in Omena, Michigan, the owners asked us to build an extension. We decided to revisit the ideas that made the first house succeed as both a sustainable building and an inviting second home
The task of designing a luxurious rooftop garden for a penthouse takes on heightened import when the apartment in question crowns the famous Zaha Hadid building at the Highline. But we relished the assignment, designing a space with custom elements inspired by Hadid's curvilinear forms and playful spirit.
This luxury high-rise apartment’s most impressive feature—the impossibly stunning view north toward Central Park through an expanse of glass—is also its greatest challenge for a designer. How to keep the view from dominating and dwarfing the space and its occupants? We decided on a custom mill piece that uses backlighting, texture, and depth to bring the living room back down to human scale and infuse it with warmth, taming the height of the ceilings and the chill of the glass.
