Our friends over at Great Lakes By Design did a cover story on one of or favorite projects, the Great Lakes Chalet on Lake Lapeer, Michigan.

The manager of our East Coast design team, Kyle Barber, RA, CPHC, NCARB has recently swapped roles. While Barber is the architect for our client’s high craft home dreams, when he and his wife made the decision to design and build their own house, he got to experience the process he has immersed himself in from the other side.

Barber says, “It's hard to design your own house, because when you're designing other people's houses, it's sort of easy to say, ‘Oh, yeah, this is what you should do,’ or ‘Maybe you should do it differently next time.’ ‘Here's what you should do over here’, or whatever, right? For my house, it's like, ‘I'm only doing this once’. It gives me a whole new perspective, by being the homeowner, on what the homeowner goes through on that side of what we do.” 

“I'm the architect of record, I engineered it, most of it. I’m the GC. I'm a certified passive house consultant. And, this time, I’m the homeowner.”

A wearer of many hats, Barber began this massive undertaking with the goal of building a legacy home for his family. Barber is passionate about high-performance building and an advocate for using sustainable materials in the design + build environment. He strove to adhere to his beliefs while conceptualizing his own legacy home.

“I think the catalyst was that I'm at a point in my career where I understand what I think is the right way to build a house for health, comfort, and durability. This was really about providing a legacy home for our family and providing a house that I feel is not only comfortable, good looking, and long-lasting, but also ultimately long term and healthy in terms of the materials we're using and the air quality for my kids as they grow up.”

“My wife and I went back and forth on if we wanted to build a new home or retrofit an existing house. The environmental activist side of me said we should renovate our existing home and not build a new house. There was another part of me that said it was going to take a lot of money to get to get it where we wanted it to be, doing a renovation. It was a big conversation in our house for a long time”

We love reclaimed stories, especially ones that put a contemporary twist on a historic past. The Curtis Manor property in the port city of Oswego, NY is a tale that we are thrilled to have taken a part in. This job is a testament to the enduring relationships that we build through the design and build of our bespoke timber frames.

The owner of the property, Tony Pauldine, worked with New Energy Works on an addition for his home almost four decades ago and immediately thought of us when the time came to erect a pavilion for his reimagined and expansive event property.

Pauldine recalls, “I had Jonathan do an addition for me about thirty-five years ago on my home, and then I got involved with Curtis Manor, this wedding venue. I wanted to have a large pavilion built. I was very pleased to be able to call New Energy Works again, and you were able to put together a design and proposal that we loved and were able to install it to our specifications.”

Curtis Manor is a former dairy farm located amongst the apple orchards on the shoreline of Lake Ontario. In 2017 the property was in a state of neglect and purchased by Pauldine. He immediately saw the promise and history in the property and embarked on a two-year renovation. The end goal was to refurbish and update the property while being sensitive to its storied past and longtime community standing.

The iconic location was instantly provided a new life as an upgraded and fully operational wedding and event facility.  The expansive property is able to accommodate most any event and features several high-end indoor-outdoor event spaces across the pastoral acreage just moments from Lake Ontario.