In 2018, Lauren and Brittan Ellingson, the owners of Notice Snowboards, a custom snowboard and wakesurf company in Whitefish, Montana, approached Workaday Design and builder Mindful Designs to concoct a new lake home for their family. The brief was, perhaps unsurprisingly, focused on getting the family outdoors as much as possible.

The site had a fitting provenance for this purpose—the land once belonged to a summer camp, and the Ellingsons’ lot hosted the administrative office. “It was an old building, and it started to have some mold issues,” says Zach George, designer and partner at Workaday Design. “So, they demoed the building and we did this building in its place—but we tried to keep that inspiration and the gabled camp feel of the original structures.”

From the beginning, the couple wanted the new home to serve as their primary residence, with an independent studio over the garage. The lot has a tricky, triangular shape—it’s bound on two sides by roadways and has tree-filtered sight lines to Whitefish Lake across the street—so the design team “angled the home as much as possible to have views toward the lake, and to create a bigger backyard area,” says George.

An open-air breezeway at the center of the residence connects the main house to the garage/studio unit. In the breezeway, an outdoor room facilitates connection between the separate living quarters. A custom slat screen, stained black, syncs with the front porches, and maintains privacy from the street. Operable doors in the screen allow for easy flow from the home to the lake.

The same slatted screen can be found on the entire rear facade of the garage and upper studio unit. Behind the screen, a staircase connects the studio to the ground level. White brick accents on the fireplace and at the angled front wall further punctuate the palette.

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Now, thanks to their new digs, the family has the ideal setting for trying out new wakesurf designs. “Brit makes a lot of custom orders where each one is unique,” says George. “But he gets to go out there and test those products. That’s definitely a cool setup.”