The Pond Home: An Architectural Floating Retreat | Lakeside Retreats

I never thought I would end up living over a pond. But it's been a delight. Like it quite a bit. If you haven't been here before it's just a sense of sort of awe and surprise. They think it's just a house in the woods and then they and they go through this sort of enclosure of the forest and then whoa I didn't know this was here because really there's no clue of it. So many times their first word is wow that's what they say. We're placed here in this structure but it's in order to engage the outdoor world and the pond just accentuates that. The pond has so much of its own life. Since we started living here it's become such an integral part of our life. I'm Carrie Critchlow. And I'm Michael Edsel. And this is our Newberg Pond house. Did you see the ducks flying this morning? Yeah. Remember the year we had the babies and they swam across the pond? Yep. It's gonna be a nice warm day today. Well we're at the front of the house. This is a 60 acre piece of property that Carrie and I had a dream and purchased it back when you could buy 60 acres for $40,000. We have a small vineyard up on top of the hill and a small winery down at the bottom of the hill and had a very good architect come and design us a home. A home that respects the environment that we're standing in. It is a big rectangle with the center of the house being suspended over the pond and then two concrete foundations. It's very simple. I mean it's just got the bedroom on one end, the kitchen on one end, and then the living area, the grand room in the middle of it. Really you can see through the whole house from one point to the other. We're empty nesters. Don't need a very large home. We interviewed quite a few architects. Carrie was able to navigate and find Jim Cutler, who we both agreed upon that would do us a nice job. Hey, how are you? It's been forever. It has been forever. My name is Jim Cutler and I designed this place. Please come in. That land is just so great. So Jim, dive in. I came down here for an afternoon and walked their land with them, looked at the place that they felt they wanted to build their house and told them that it was the wrong place. Walking back down, I saw a glint of water through the trees. And I said, what's that? And they said, oh, that's an old logging pond. And it was all silted in. So the pond was actually over there about 20 meters. And we built this house and then we dug out under it to bring the pond to it. That's his biggest gift, is being out of place, a structure. This house, people sometimes think it's been here forever. It just looked like it was in the landscape naturally. I compress people as they come down that walkway. We give them some sense of anticipation of arrival. The door opens up and you have that. You have this powerful experience and it's memorable. As we come in, we are standing in the main living area of the home. One of our favorite things about this room is the reflection you get off the pond, which you can see right now. Cutler is also all about not hiding any of the structure. The three doors that open up is what we probably use and appreciate the most. Kind of defines the house. Mr. Cutler was very proud of his design with counterweights. These are about 200 pounds of lead bar on a pulley that allows the door easy lifting. There's three rooms with an identical door, but it kind of has a completely different impact in each of those rooms. Kitchen, it's like an extension of the kitchen. Here, it's your access to the pond. And in our bedroom, it's kind of the garden right in front. You know, what's quite interesting is these deep cubicles that are built into the wall and extend into the exterior. It doesn't take away from the square footage, really. Same with these giant closets here. Do you want to see another feature of Jim Cutler's? He patented these doorknobs. They're not centered. They work like a cam. A detail that most people would miss. The kitchen. We cook quite a bit, but very casually. We're not gourmet cooks, but we have people over a lot, especially with all of our extended family. We usually, in the summer, always have that door open, and so the patio is an extension of the kitchen. Every counter, there's just endless outlets if you ever need to plug in a lot of things. The wood flooring is over the pond, really, and the concrete starts really over the land, right, Michael? Yes. This is where the pond ends and land starts. Because we live on a farm, and I'm constantly walking into the house with muddy boots, let me show you the mudroom. The floor elevation is six inches below. It helps trap some of the debris and chaos. It separates the house slightly. It works great. So the hallway looks like that, a hallway, connecting sort of your mudroom all the way to the bedroom, but off the hallway is kind of these hidden spaces, almost like a boat. The laundry room is in here. The bathroom, they're very similar size bathroom. It's a guest bathroom, and again, you wouldn't really know it's there. You'd think it was just the hallway to the other end, which enters our bedroom, the only bedroom. Beautiful place to wake up in the morning. The chickens are starting to wake up. The frogs are out there. We usually end up sleeping with the window half open and sleep really well in here. Walk around to the bathroom. One of the things I insisted on with Cutler was I really wanted a bathtub. He wasn't going to put one in, so he came up with this pretty unique solution, which was to put the sunken bathtub in with the shower. And then he came up with the idea of two little windows in there to open up and listen to the birds as you're taking a bath. On the side of the house, there's a sauna. We frequently in the wintertime, we'll use this sauna maybe three times a week. We do this, go in for 15 minutes. We walk down the steps into the pond and do a cold plunge. Then we go back in for 15 minutes and then back in the pond. They say the secret to living a long, enjoyable life is just to keep moving. And fortunately, we both are just really active people. Cheers. Who's going to start the grill? We're going to be late for dinner. Life is such a journey, a good journey. We have a lot of family around. Michael has three grown sons. I have three grown daughters and we have seven grandchildren. Did you get a frog, John? Yeah, a wolf frog. They're over a lot stopping in. Unannounced. Unannounced, usually. So there's a lot of family activity as well. A lovely evening. I think we're very privileged and thankful. Houses are, they're more than shelter. The fact is that houses are dreams. They're an expression of who we are and what we believe in.