LAKESIDE Reverie

On Alabama's Lake Martin, Bobby McAlpine and Blake Weeks mix this and thatfairy tales, Japanese techniques, Nordic mythology, and Gothic elements-to cast a soulful artists' hideaway.

- STEPHANIE HUNT

In the dining alcove, a circa-1700s wingback chair juxtaposes an oversize white oak and steel dining table and a pair of crisply modern banquettes (fabric, Perennials). OPPOSITE: A Bali-esque "summer house" extends out over the water.

DEEP IN THE ALABAMA WOODS, where oaks and cedars give way to water, where full-throated bullfrogs bellow in the obsidian night, there lives a house. Or maybe more of a house-ish nymph-a mystical, thatch-roofed inhabitant of the forest. With lozenge-window eyes, a cloak of darkest ebony, and 11-foot finials gently bowing up toward the sky, this enchanted being is the creation of architect Bobby McAlpine and his partner, Blake Weeks, both Alabama natives. McAlpine, for his part, had been on the hunt for decades for the "consummate lake property," he explains, "one enveloped by water, a spot that could hold some romantic building or series of buildings."

Though he hadn't grown up going to lakes, the architect was "smitten" when he first discovered Lake Martin in his early 20s. "It was one of my first non-suburban experiences," he says of visiting a friend's cabin there, immersed in woodsy waterside quietude. It was a spot he returned to year after year to celebrate a birthday week of solo creative musing. "I'd draw and dream. Many houses and furniture designs were birthed there," he says. Now, some 40 years later, when that elusive dream property finally materialized along these same shores, McAlpine and Weeks have birthed this furtive being, this house-but-not-house, a home deconstructed into different pavilions. Because a lake house, McAlpine believes, is a unique creature.