Lightkeeper's House - Breezy Coastal Lighthouse Plan

Breezy Coastal Lighthouse House Plan

A featured residence of the 2006 Street of Dreams, the finished Lightkeeper's House is a 7,000 - square foot coastal home plan with an additional 2,500 square feet of decks, patios and outdoor living space. The continuous flow of movement between indoors and outdoors makes it highly suitable for lake living. With a master bedroom and a guest room on the main level plus four bedrooms upstairs, the house easily accommodates adult or family living as a primary or secondary home. Based on the traditional shingle-style classic American cottage, the main spaces of the house wrap around a center courtyard and every room opens onto a porch for ventilation. Although spacious, the individual areas of the house have a scaled-down feeling of comfort that is usually reserved for smaller homes. This is cozy living on a grand scale. "I wanted there to be zones that provide that cottage feeling throughout the house," Klippel says. By connecting to the outdoors with porches and an abundance of natural light, spaces don't need to be big to live big. There are complicated intersections, curved windows and walls, layered moldings and intriguing nooks. Wide-planked yellow pine hardwood floors in every room make it easy to walk barefoot up from the lake without a worry. The interiors, designed by Holly Peck, incorporate soft natural ocean colors from corals and browns to blues and greens. Every room integrates the nautical theme with fabrics and accessories such as shells, driftwood, sand dollars, buoys and pictures of sea birds and beach creatures. "Holly, who grew up on St. Simons and Sea Island, was a perfect fit for our team," says Klippel. From the entrance, the sight lines reveal a broad vista of the home. Visitors can view the living room, dining room, courtyard, open stairwell, guest bedroom and the companionway with a glimpse into the kitchen and keeping rooms. The detailed woodwork is a feast for the eye.

On the way to the "grand salon", the companionway, or hallway, has a wall of windows on one side and, on the other, a clever inside window that allows views of the center courtyard from the kitchen. Unifying all, the courtyard pulls fire and water into the equation with a reflecting pool, Jacuzzi and brick fireplace. Two gentle waterfalls, one on either side of the footbridge that spans the pool and Jacuzzi, provide lulling sounds to soothe the most frazzled nerves. Although one of the most formal rooms of the house, the grand salon is ultimately designed to be approachable. Chairs swathed in navy fabric with a gold cording design, pillows with shell-patterned fabrics, a tabletop tortoise figurine and handcrafted lighthouse replicas keep all things nautical. A large oval leather-topped bench does double duty as a cocktail table. Two niches, holding large decorative shells on matching stands, flank the light colored stone fireplace. One wall of the salon provides access to the courtyard with two sets of sliding French doors.

Another opens to a veranda where southern-style porch rockers on a half radius platform call to visitors to linger a while. With all the doors thrown wide, the grand salon becomes an expansive space perfect for hosting a large crowd. Immediately across the courtyard from the grand salon is the main floor guest bedroom. Dubbed the Lightkeepers room by Peck, she envisioned it as the domain of the solitary older man who tends the beacon, and so used a twin bed and a masculine decor. "I went with a lot of texture in here, with leather, tweed fabric and Roman shades of Nantucket bamboo", says the designer. Reds, blacks and khakis lend a touch of the Scottish Highlands. Both the bed and the reading nook sit in gracefully curving alcoves.

The family gathering place is just on the other side of the companionway. "I firmly believe that the kitchen is the social center of the home, so I literally put it in the heart of the house", says Klippel. The middle of the kitchen and keeping room is vertically open to a balconied area on the story above. A dramatic fireplace on one wall contributes to the warmth of the area, giving it the ambiance of a hearth room. Just off the kitchen is a pantry and convenient home office. Every corner of the Lightkeepers house is a sonnet to well-thought-out elements and attention to detail. It is a home built with quiet places for solitude and grand spaces to gather in comfort and meant to be filled with loving and laughter, family and friends.

(From Atlanta Style & Design Magazine - Spring 2007 Issue)

We offer floor plan modifications on all of our Coastal Cottage style house plan designs.

Interior Photos