There’s a house on a peninsula in rural Alabama that watches the water from three sides. Its architect, Jeffrey Dungan, says he thought of it as a camera, a device for framing and cropping the world outside. Inside, designer Betsy Brown stripped everything back until only the essential remained. What they produced together is something rare: a family home that feels both deeply rooted in place and entirely its own.
Lake Wehapa isn’t a name you’ll find on many design world itineraries. That’s part of the point. Dungan’s Birmingham-based practice has long been drawn to the particular poetry of the American South, its craft traditions, its materials, its slow pace, and this project, a retreat conceived around the rhythms of rest, connection, and multi-generational gathering, distils that sensibility down to something almost elemental. The client brief, as Dungan’s studio describes it, was to host a full constellation of life experiences: rest, joy, respite, entertainment, family. The rhythm of the home is easy and quiet, with bold and lively moments meant to bring people together.
Rather than designing a conventional lakeside house, Dungan conceived a compound of interconnected boxes, a cluster of small structures that change material and form so the residence reads as though it evolved naturally over time. The approach allowed maximum square footage without an imposing footprint, while creating multiple exposures to flood the interiors with natural light. Set on a peninsula jutting into the lake, the orientation provides water views on three sides; the entire plan was optimised to frame them. “I thought of the house as a camera and tried to frame and crop as many views of the lake as possible to make the setting as picturesque as it could be.”
The material palette is both grounded and unexpected. Texas limestone, cypress, and hand-applied plaster sit alongside sleek steel window frames and structural supports, a combination that produces what Dungan calls a tension between the sophisticated and the rustic. The exterior reads as weathered and natural; the interiors are something else entirely.
Betsy Brown’s brief to herself was almost monastic: a narrow palette, ruthlessly edited, with every remaining object asked to carry its weight. It started with a set of vintage Kaare Klint dining chairs, the legendary Danish modernist whose mid-century pieces enjoy cult status among cognoscenti, whose burnished cognac leather became the anchor for everything else. From there, Brown pared the colour scheme down to black and white, then allowed Dungan’s material choices to do the heavy lifting: chalky plaster walls, timber beams the colour of sand, a crusty stone fireplace, and expanses of sleek dusky steel that lend an unexpected urbanity to the whole.
The results are anything but austere. In the breakfast nook, a plaster pendant by Rose Uniacke, pure Jean-Michel Frank refinement, hovers above a plainspoken farm table. An antique Orkney chair with woven rush back sits near a Robert Motherwell print and a painting by Antoni Tapies. Ebonized open shelving in the scullery, complete with a built-in library ladder, elevates the workaday into something worth looking at. Brown’s thinking throughout: the fewer elements you use, the more each one becomes sculptural. The dialogue between what’s left becomes supremely important.
Scale and proportion are the hidden architecture of the whole. A sofa measuring over 17 feet long, actually two sectionals pushed together, anchors the kitchen sitting area, generous enough for a family to fully inhabit. In the glass-enclosed living room, with soaring 18-foot ceilings, a curated arrangement of sofas creates a snug nest within the lofty space. The bedroom, by contrast, shelters beneath a cove-like curved ceiling, its linen armchairs and antique Asian tables kept in creamy quietude. Every space calibrated for a different register of togetherness.
There’s a version of this project that could have been beautiful and forgettable, another polished lake house with good bones and safe choices. What makes the Lake Wehapa retreat compelling is its refusal of the obvious at every turn. The architecture looks settled, as though it grew there; the interiors feel both scholarly and deeply liveable. The whole compound earns what Brown calls its rate of return: they live in every square inch of that house.
Dungan’s practice, based in Birmingham, has spent decades interrogating what Southern architecture can mean without retreating into nostalgia. The Lake Wehapa house is one of the clearest answers he’s given: modern without being cold, rooted without being backward-looking, and entirely alive to the extraordinary setting it inhabits. A house that knows how to look.
Architecture Jeffrey Dungan Architects, Birmingham, Alabama
Interior Design Betsy Brown
Location Lake Wehapa, Alabama
Photography Adrian Gaut
