There is a particular kind of restraint that only comes from a designer building for himself. Gray Davis has spent more than two decades shaping some of the world’s most photographed interiors, from resort hideaways to city hotel lobbies, as co-founder of Meyer Davis. His own house, set directly on the shoreline of Copake Lake at the foot of the Berkshires, is where all of that experience gets pared down to something quieter and entirely personal.
Davis and his husband, Chase Booth, had known this stretch of land for years before it was theirs to build on. The brief, as Davis has described it, was never complicated. He wanted a simple glass house on the water, one that let the lake do most of the talking.
What resulted is a contemporary reading of a familiar modernist idea, the kind of low, glazed volume that owes something to Philip Johnson’s Glass House without ever leaning on it as a reference. Floor-to-ceiling glass runs the length of the house, doubling the tree line back at itself. Retractable panels fold the walls away entirely when the weather allows, so the line between inside and outside effectively disappears. Deep overhangs keep the house grounded rather than exposed, and the pool sits below the main level, treated as a feature of the landscape rather than a centerpiece to be admired from the house.
“I had a very clear picture in my head of a simple glass house on the lake.”
The plan works the way a good host’s house should. Social spaces face the water, where the great room opens fully to the lake, while four bedrooms sit toward the woods on the opposite side, giving the house a quieter register when it needs one. A long gallery runs the full depth of the plan, lined in narrow wood battens that give the corridor its own rhythm and warmth as it moves from the great room to the private wing.
Materially, the house stays close to a familiar Meyer Davis palette: natural stone, oak, linen, bouclé, and sculptural lighting layered over a restrained architectural shell. None of it reads as newly bought for the occasion. Davis and Booth have furnished the house with pieces gathered over years, several of which have moved with them from home to home, and it is that accumulated layer that keeps the interiors from feeling like a showroom.
The primary suite sits at the far end of the house, with a floating bed positioned for unbroken views through the trees toward the lake. It is furnished in part with pieces from Davis’s own design lines, including a lounge chair from his William Gray collection and a side table from Arca ETERNA, a small but telling detail from a designer who rarely gets to specify for himself.
The house also carries a quieter architectural memory. Davis has spoken of childhood summers by a lake in Tennessee, and there is a version of that feeling built into Copake: a house designed less to impress than to be lived in, fully, by the people who use it most. It is now one of several residential projects featured in Meyer Davis’s new monograph, The Language of Home, a book that traces the firm’s shift from hospitality-scale glamour toward something more intimate and personal.
For a firm best known for resorts and hotel lobbies built to perform for strangers, Copake is the opposite exercise: a house built for exactly two people, and for the friends they bring back to it, again and again.
Photography by The Ingalls
