Beautiful Simple House on Lake Okoboji

This beautiful house was designed by E.B. Min, Jeffrey L. Day. This house is located in rural Iowa, Lake Okoboji. This house sits on a diminutive lot on the dense shoreline where old cottages and new McMansions sit tightly together. The simple footprint minimized the size of the house on the site while allowing for a series of spatial frames within the house that focus on the view while excluding the neighbors. The lake is ringed by numerous oak trees which form beautiful a canopy around the lake.

The primary living spaces are open to the lake and woods views, but visually closed to neighbors on the sides. The architects formed the house’s spatial tubes around view axes running through the site, perceptually linking the lake through the forest to the fields beyond. There’re view-framing tubes which are literal voids in the mass of the house bounded at their ends only by glass. The first level is dominated by continuous subtly amorphous space. It opens to the exterior in with lake views in several directions. The bedrooms and bathrooms are treated with a pronounced sense of interiority. All interior surfaces in those rooms are subsumed by intense color to the extent that each feels like a zone of pure color.