When Milwaukee-based financial advisor John Geiger decided to build a summer home, the choice of locale was clear: scenic Green Lake, Wisconsin, a spot he has adored for years. “We felt so fortunate to find an empty parcel of land,” he says. “It’s a very different piece of land—a cliff really.” A collector of contemporary art of the Midwest and an architecture buff, Geiger had no intention of building “a regular Wisconsin summer house on a regular lake lot.”

Fortunately, the then-fledgling Milwaukee firm Johnsen Schmaling Architects was up for the challenge. As one of their first commissions, the firm tackled Geiger’s request for “an unusual, honest house” with aplomb. Unlike the typical lot Geiger passed up, his cliffside retreat is something more unique. “By putting your living area on that high level you get this amazingly dramatic treetop view looking down on the lake,” notes architect Brian Johnsen.

Blessed with a rather leisurely building schedule—four years passed from initial design to completion—Johnsen and partner Sebastian Schmaling were able to carefully consider the site before breaking ground. “We were struck by the verticality of the trees, their colors and ongoing seasonal change, and [the] bark patterns of the over 100 species on the site,” says Johnsen, describing the arbors whose forms and textures would become so integral to the house’s design.

The result is an assuming 2,400-square-foot home clad in unfinished cedar tongue-and-groove siding that, over the course of the next year or so, will gradually turn a silvery gray. Though the house will begin to change and weather over time, a series of laminated wood panels at the entryway, each with a different grain, will retain their rich hues. “I’m not that excited about building a structure and then painting it,” says Geiger. “Why not use a material that becomes more interesting and important over time, [rather] than less?” As Geiger wants this house to be a family retreat for generations to come, it too has the chance to become, with time, more interesting and more important.