Inside the BMD Design Process For a Custom lake Home

One of our clients explained the reason behind her lake home in a single sentence. Build it and they will come.

She was not describing a house and the majority of our clients rarely are. They come to us describing a July afternoon with grandchildren running through it, the week their kids come home from college with friends in tow, or the quiet Friday when it is just the two of them, a round of golf, dinner at the clubhouse, and the boat out after dark. They have watched the hours their family spends under one roof become harder to come by, and they want a place that makes those hours happen more often for generations to come.

That is the brief behind nearly every second home we design.

Beth founded Beth Meyer Design more than thirty years ago and is now a grandmother. Abby, our senior designer, is raising young children of her own. Between the two of us we are living both ends of the life these homes are built to hold, which is why, when we are standing in a set of plans for our client’s second home, we are not reading a floor plan in the abstract. We are picturing a specific Saturday and holding it to the standard we would want for our own family.

A House That Holds Several Families at Once

“there’s no SKU number on a true custom piece”

Beth Meyer

My heart is so full when I get to take my family somewhere and have everybody under my roof.

Beth Meyer

A second home asks different questions of a designer than a primary residence does, and the answers change nearly every decision that follows.

A primary residence is designed around the people who live in it. You know how many there are, when they eat, and how they move through a day. A lake home is designed around three or four households sharing one roof for days at a time.

So we ask different questions early. How many people are cooking in the kitchen at the same time, because on a lake weekend the answer is never one. Whether the house needs a second laundry room downstairs near the bunk rooms. How many families arrive with a dog, because three dogs change what we can specify for rugs and upholstery before aesthetics enter the conversation at all.

On one of our Lake Burton projects, the children who will fill the bunk room are people we know by name. Laying it out was never a question of bed count but rather creating a space for ten cousins who will remember that room for the rest of their lives.

The Most Important Door Faces the Water

Where a home sits on its lot and how it turns toward the water belong to the architect. What happens once a family comes through the door is ours. In a primary residence, the hardest-working door is the one from the garage. On the lake it is the one from the dock, and everything about it has to be planned around what comes through it: sand, wet feet, coolers, towels, and life jackets, most of it arriving at once.

That means flooring that can take all of it, and also somewhere to set things down on the way in. On one property, the boathouse had no bathroom, which meant every child coming out of the water would have to cross the house to reach one. We planned a bathroom just inside the lake entrance instead.

The same thinking produced one of our favorite details on a recent home. We built an ice maker and a bar near the water so coolers could be filled at the dock rather than carried back through the kitchen every afternoon.

Square Footage Is Spent Differently

Guests at a second home stay days, not weeks, and that single fact changes how space should be allocated. It is why the grand closets that are standard in a primary residence are wasted square footage in a second home. We plan built-in closets instead, with a few sized deliberately to hold functional items like a pack and play near the rooms where parents with infants will sleep.

The same logic applies to the quieter visits our clients take when it is just the two of them. They drive up on a Thursday, work a full day from the lake on Friday, and stay through Monday. So a lot of the homes we design on the water have a real place to work, positioned so that when the day ends it can be closed and left behind.

None of this comes at the expense of beauty. But functional beauty determines how much of a family’s time together is spent enjoying the home versus working around it. Every time someone hunts for a towel, tracks water across a room that cannot take it, or carries a cooler through the kitchen, the house has taken a small bite out of a weekend that may only come a handful of times a year. 

A Lived in Home Before the Family Arrives

The last step of a second home is the one families never think to ask about, because most do not know it is an option. A house on the lake is finished when a family can walk in on a Friday night with only their suitcases and start the weekend that evening.

So we stock it before they arrive. Pantry staples, herbs, the bar, and real backstock down to the toiletries, because there is rarely a store nearby and nobody wants to spend the first afternoon of a vacation shopping. We select the china and the everyday glassware, and the tumblers that get carried down to the dock. We work through a checklist that gets as specific as whether a family wants a toaster or a toaster oven, then walk the floor plan and decide where all of it lives.

There is no household to pack up and no life to move from one address to another. The art is hung, the beds are made, and the pantry is labeled so a guest who has never been in the house can find the coffee. This is the final step of building a true custom luxury lake home. 

A Home Meant to Be Passed Down

We design for endurance and the reality of life within a home because these houses often outlast the reason they were first built. The grandchildren running through the house in July may one day be the ones who inherit it, and the decisions we make now are the ones they will live inside twenty years from now.

That is why every decision in a custom second home is made specifically for the family who will live there, rather than pulled from a formula. The time and thought invested in getting those details right ultimately buys something much more valuable: a Saturday morning in July when everyone is there, the house works exactly as it should, and nothing about it asks for their attention.

It simply gives them a place to be together. And, ultimately, that is what we believe a family home on the water should do. If you are beginning to imagine what that place could look like for your family, we would be honored to help you create it. Inquire today.