Lakeside
Lakeside is a minimalist residence located in Birmingham, Michigan, designed by Disbrow Iannuzzi. The Y-shaped plan is an unusual formal gesture – one that resists the rectilinear logic of most residential architecture in favor of something more responsive. Splaying outward across a parklike site where the River Rouge winds through decades of careful cultivation, the home’s tripartite form creates multiple orientations toward a landscape its owner has shaped for over forty years. It is a house built not around rooms but around views, each wing framing a different relationship between interior warmth and the elaborate topography beyond.
What elevates Lakeside beyond its striking silhouette is a radical material economy. The entire project is constructed from just two primary materials – white ash and black slate – deployed with a rigor that transforms limitation into expressive range. The slate, sourced from a single quarry, undergoes nearly every possible treatment the material will allow. Split into roof shingles, cleft and cut for wall cladding, slabbed and honed for horizontal surfaces, crushed and compacted at the driveway, its remnants gathered into gabions for retaining walls – the stone is exhausted across every possible state of refinement. This is not mere resourcefulness but a deep commitment to understanding what one material can become. Throughout the day, sunlight transforms the exterior from a subdued surface where veining reads as subtle pattern to a dramatically textured wall where light rakes across the cleft face, amplifying the geological character embedded in each piece.
The interior performs a precise inversion. Where slate is rough, varied, and responsive to shifting light, the white ash that lines ceilings, walls, and floors was selected for its consistent linear grain – a material that exudes quiet warmth through visual restraint. The detailing is subtle but purposeful. At key points of spatial transition, the wood shifts from quarter-sawn to plain-cut within the same four-inch pattern, a change perceptible more as feeling than as visible event. It is the kind of decision that rewards sustained attention, marking thresholds without interrupting the continuity of the envelope. A single fifteen-foot plank of ash with dramatic cathedral grain serves as a long bench for displaying the client’s collection of bronze castings – the same species of wood, but allowed here to express a wilder, more figural character that dialogues with the sculptural objects it supports.