Favorites

Floor plan of Solluna by Ideas of Order

The wood-heavy interior is completely clad in plywood, giving the house a warm glow at night.

For an upstairs bedroom, John made side tables out of plywood left over from the house construction. The desk is his father’s childhood desk, and the Virgen de Guadalupe blanket is from a market in Juárez, Mexico, not far from where Sylvia grew up.

Beech flooring runs from the living area into the open dining area and kitchen, which is outfitted with a modular wooden cabinet system from Coquo, a Montreal company. A metal Pétalo bowl by Brooklyn designer Alvaro Ucha Rodriguez sits on the counter, and wooden chairs found decades ago at the local dump surround the table.

Brooklyn designer

Alebrijes

Plywood mega-shingles cover much of the facade, and large windows let in views on the lake side.

My family has been spending summers on a stretch of the Lake Champlain shore since my great-grandfather, a minister, followed Methodist theologian Georgia Harkness there. (She once called the area “one of the most beautiful spots on the face of the earth.”) But my parents’ old camp, one of a couple my grandparents passed to their kids, was sliding into ruin. So, my parents, Sylvia Balderrama and John Morley, turned to Henry Ng and Jacob Esocoff of New York architecture firm Ideas of Order, who designed a replacement in a contemporary style that respected the local history. The living space opens onto the porch, where Sylvia sits on a blanket she crocheted that covers a chair from a nearby second-hand store.