On a perfect Saturday afternoon this summer, Lindsay Pauly stood in the kitchen of her vacation house in central Wisconsin, the calm eye of a family whirlwind. Her 4-year-old twin boys were bent intently over a mountain of Legos on the dining table, her 10-month-old son was crawling fearlessly across the kitchen floor, her 6-year-old daughter was getting ready for a walk with Lindsay’s mom, and a cousin had just rolled in from Germany.

Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of the living room, pale blue Lake Winnebago beckoned. Lindsay was in her element. The Madison, Wisconsin, native grew up spending summers on this stretch of grassy lakefront dotted with houses belonging to her parents and relatives; her children are the sixth generation to vacation here.

When she and her husband, Daniel Ohrtman, a bond trader, decided to build a place in the family compound for their own growing family to escape the noisy bustle of their home base of Brooklyn, connection was key: to that past, to their extended families in the Midwest, and of course to the lake itself. So was style. “We love minimalism,” says Lindsay, an interior designer. “If it were just Dan and me, we’d be living in a white cube.”

Milwaukee architect Stephen Bruns neatly met the couple’s requirements with a pair of black gabled forms that, as he puts it, “distill the idea of home.” The south volume, which is narrower and slightly shorter, houses family bedrooms and Dan’s office, while the north one comprises a double-height kitchen and living room plus a guest room and a loft. A single-story volume containing the dining room and entrance hall connects them.

On the lake side, near total glazing links the house to the water and powerfully emphasizes the home’s triangular forms. The side walls, meanwhile, are almost windowless and twice as thick as is typical to accommodate insulation as well as drainage and ventilation systems.

The process was collaborative—typical for Bruns, but unusually so this time because Lindsay handled many aspects of the interior (the limited palette is a nod to her mother, who wears only black and white).

As for the overall design, Lindsay requested just one major tweak to the space: angling the “private” volume so that the window of the twins’ bedroom, in the center, would open toward the lake. “I grew up sharing a gabled room with my brother in the house my great-grandfather built overlooking this lake, and we’d fall asleep listening to the waves. I wanted that for my kids,” she says.

Project Credits:

Architect: Bruns Architecture / @brunsarchitecture

Builder: Tielens Construction

Engineer: Core 4 Engineering / @core4engineering

Cabinetry Designer: V&A Custom Cabinet

Photographer: Noah Kalina / @noahkalina

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