Home on Crooked Lake
Lake, Michigan USA
2022

Purchased in the autumn of 2017, the home on Crooked Lake has become a place of refuge and reconnection, a counterpoint to the family’s busy lives in Mumbai. Each summer and winter holiday, they return to the quiet landscapes of Michigan and to the modest house at the water’s edge. The original structure was a simple, archetypal gabled form—a childlike silhouette that echoes the vernacular of balloon-framed Midwestern houses. By extending this outline down the slope toward the lake, the renovation introduced a soaring double-height living room and an additional bedroom, while a careful rearrangement of the interior yielded further bedrooms and expanded kitchen and dining spaces.

Critical to the transformation was the decision to preserve the framing of the lakeside façade while forming a threshold between old and new. This gesture created a dramatic triple-height volume of continuous air and light. At the middle level, the dining and kitchen overlook the timber-lined living room below, while vaulted ceilings draw the eye upward to a mezzanine bedroom above. A newly built bridge spans across this space, linking the original mezzanine to a children’s sleeping loft with views over the lake.

Framed by expansive picture windows, the living room anchors the house as both social center and lookout. The large openings capture the shifting seasons, the play of light across water, and the textures and movements of the hillside garden. From every public space, the landscape is drawn inward, blurring the threshold between the intimacy of the interior and the wider horizon of rural Michigan.