Our client wanted a Lake Michigan residence designed for the way their extended family actually gathers: confident, experienced, and committed to spending time together on their own terms. After building seven previous homes together, they envisioned a single property that could host multiple generations under one roof while preserving the privacy, independence, and personal space each household required.
Designing a single residence to function as a connected collection of independent living suites required a complex strategy. Each occupant or household needed a defined privacy, complete with their own amenities, without fragmenting the home’s flow or diluting its shared gathering spaces. Adding to the problem, the original concept was engineer-led architecture with elements of commercial shapes and forms. Bringing it to full residential expression required resolving aesthetics and function across the architecture and the interior design.
Engelsma developed a residence featuring:
That spaces households apart and minimizes daily circulation friction.
With private bathroom, kitchen, and independent lake access behind the garage.
A show kitchen built for hosting and a fully functional working kitchen behind it.
Oriented to stay open and usable during Lake Michigan’s prevailing winds.
Anchoring the kitchen-to-dining transition as the home’s focal point rather than a television.
Configured as a connective spine for the family’s extensive art collection.
This residence demonstrates Engelsma’s ability to take a sophisticated client’s preliminary vision and resolve it into a home that’s a connected community of independent living spaces. For experienced clients who have built homes before and know exactly what they want, the value Engelsma added was less about supplying a vision and more about completing one: bringing interior design and program zoning into a single, coherent expression. The result is a home that hosts effortlessly during informal family visits, where each generation operates on its own schedule and still gathers without friction at the fireplace.
This residence demonstrates the discipline of designing for how confident, experienced families actually live: together when they choose to be, and entirely independent when they don’t.
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