This Adirondack lakefront lodge with wrap around porches and stunning lake views was lovingly designed to seamlessly merge rugged Adirondack exterior aesthetics with turn of the century Craftsman interior style. Consisting of a main home and an adjacent guest & care takers quarters connected by large, elevated porches with timber covered walkways, this family home harkens to the lodge homes of the Adirondack region of New York in the early 1900’s.

“This building I would term a Craftsman - Adirondack fusion. The main house and the guest house are interconnected by covered walkways much in the fashion of the great Adirondack camps of the days of yore, where you could go from building to building under cover,” says Carlton Homes of Holmes, King & Kallquist Architects, the architecture firm behind the project. “The interior is a throwback to the Craftsman era of design, probably 1910 to 1920 era, with quarter sawn White Oak and other past era detailing, while the exterior is classic Adirondack post & beam with cove siding.”

With a desire to be closer to friends and family the homeowners bought the modestly sized one-hundred-foot-wide lakefront property in the Adirondack region of central New York with the intention to build a functional home that would allow them to gracefully age in place in the decades to come.

Renowned folk musician and guitarist Happy Traum, along with his wife Jane, and architect son-in-law Barry Price, teamed up with New Energy Works recently to create a Japanese inspired car port for their property near the legendary town of Woodstock in Ulster County New York.

Happy began his music career in the 1950s as part of the emerging acoustic and folk scene in Greenwich Village - New York City alongside contemporaries like Bob Dylan. Having longstanding ties with the local community, Happy and his wife Jane first moved to the Woodstock area in the 1960’s from NYC, riding the success of one of Happy’s early record deals to purchase the property.

“We have lived in the Woodstock area since 1967. We moved up here from New York and bought a piece of property and started to build,” Happy’s wife Jane told us. “Our world is the world of music, and we were drawn to Woodstock because it was an artist colony and a music center, even before the famous music festival, so we put down roots here.”

Anthony Venezia  has been spending his weekends this past year building a highly crafted high-performance home in Canandaigua New York. This construction project is designed to be a modern and sustainable home for Anthony and his family and features dark stained Douglas fir timber accents as well as two-tone Shou Sugi Ban exterior siding and white oak flooring & stair treads from our sister company Pioneer Millworks.

Most importantly, the home utilizes our High Performance Made Easier ™ (HPEz) enclosure system which enabled Anthony and Luke to construct the home to the efficiency standards they wanted to achieve with the project. 

Now that the family home is nearing completion, we caught up with Anthony to discuss how the project got started, why he wanted to build sustainably, and what it was like building a home for his family with a high-performance enclosure system that was manufactured off-site.

Q: How did this high-performance construction project get started?