Where the Water Meets the Wood

A lakefront commission by The Dernehl Company and Harrison Design becomes a masterclass in how architecture and interiors can tell a single, uninterrupted story.

Photography by Drew Castelhano · As seen in Atlanta Style & Design

There is a particular kind of home that doesn’t announce itself. It earns its authority through proportion, material, and restraint — through decisions made at every scale, from the fieldstone base that anchors the structure to the hammered brass sink tucked inside a lacquered blue bar.

Designed by Harrison Design and built by The Dernehl Company, both based in Atlanta, this lakefront residence sits on the Georgia waterfront with the confidence of something that has always been there. The programme was ambitious — multiple living zones, a full entertaining floor, a wine cellar, a panelled library, a professional kitchen — and yet the home reads not as a catalogue of amenities but as a single, coherent gesture toward the water.

The Great Room

The great room sets the register for everything that follows. A cathedral ceiling of exposed timber trusses rises above a seating arrangement composed around a two-story fieldstone fireplace, its rough-hewn mantle a deliberate counterpoint to the refined upholstery below. Twin iron chandeliers, scaled generously to the volume, suspend just enough drama without competing with what matters most: the lake, framed by tall windows that run from floor to ridge.

“The architecture is a sequence of reveals — each space earning the next.”

It is a room that trusts its bones. The furniture is comfortable, the arrangement convivial, but neither competes with the spatial event happening overhead. This is a discipline that runs through the entire project: the design never overspends on a room that the architecture has already made extraordinary.

The Dining Room

Step through to the dining room and the language shifts — from rustic grandeur to refined elegance — without ever breaking the narrative thread. Coffered ceilings trimmed in dark timber give way to a wall of black steel windows that frame the lake as a living painting. A custom lantern pendant, minimal in silhouette, hangs with just the right restraint above a table set for twelve.

The diamond-patterned chairs carry a quietly recurring motif that surfaces again in the drapery trim — a detail that only reveals itself on close inspection, the kind of connection that signals a design team working in concert rather than in parallel.

Two Kitchens, Two Personalities

The main kitchen is a room built for serious cooking without sacrificing the pleasure of being in it. White painted cabinetry reaches to the coffered ceiling, its scale amplified by a quartet of mercury glass pendant lights that pool warm light across a generous marble island. The custom range hood — white with an ebony inlay trim — is the room’s quiet focal point: an architectural object that earns its prominence.

But the house keeps its most unexpected culinary statement in reserve. A second kitchen — what the family calls the catering kitchen, though it functions as something closer to a working larder — stops visitors entirely.

The Working Kitchen. Herringbone brick floors. A reclaimed farmhouse table. White subway tile running to the ceiling. And suspended above it all, a collection of antique copper cookware hung from a hand-forged iron rack — patinated, beautiful, and in active daily use. This is a room that has been lived in and loved, and it photographs like a page from a French country magazine. It is, by some measure, the most singular space in the entire project.

The Library

The library is where the architecture becomes genuinely emotional. Floor-to-ceiling quarter-sawn oak panelling — mitre-jointed, coffered at the ceiling, luminous in afternoon light — wraps a room anchored by a carved stone fireplace surround of near-Gothic detailing. A pair of green leather wing chairs face the hearth in the classic arrangement, their colour the only warm note in a palette of stone, oak, and linen.

To the right, black steel windows run the full height of the room, the lake visible in the distance through mature pines. It is a room that feels both ancient and completely of this moment — an achievement that requires both an architect and an interior team operating at the top of their craft.

The Wine Cellar

There is a moment, passing through the black steel and glass door into the wine cellar, that stops every visitor. Fieldstone walls give way to a brick barrel-vault ceiling. A classical sculpture — a fragment, an Echo of antiquity — presides over a walnut credenza set with glasses and open bottles. The floor is travertine. The rack holds several hundred bottles in a column that reads like a work of installation art.

No single space in the house so clearly announces that this project was built by people with a strong point of view. It is a wine cellar, yes, but it is also a room — one that takes its own character seriously and delivers it without apology.

The Wet Bar

If the wine cellar is the home’s most atmospheric space, the wet bar is its most graphic. High-gloss navy lacquer runs from floor to ceiling — cabinetry, walls, and ceiling unified in a single saturated register. A large mirror framed in the same navy reflects the open-riser staircase beyond, creating a spatial depth that makes the tight footprint feel architecturally generous. The hammered brass sink and polished brass hardware are the room’s only warmth, and they earn it completely. It is the kind of space that photograph-seekers find on Instagram and send to their designer with the words ‘something like this’ — which is precisely the function it serves in this portfolio.

The Master Suite

The master bath brings the project to a quietly luxurious close. Calacatta marble covers the shower surround in large-format slabs — the veining continuous across the wall — while the built-in soaking tub sits in its own marble-clad alcove beside the window. A dressing vanity in grey-painted cabinetry with brass hardware sits in the corner, the lake visible through the window above it. A brass lantern pendant hangs at the centre of the room, small enough to be unobtrusive, precise enough to finish the space.

It is, like the rest of the house, a room that rewards attention. The decisions compound. The details accumulate. And the water, always, is just outside.

Project Credits

Architecture: Harrison Design, Atlanta, Georgia

Builder: The Dernehl Company, Atlanta, Georgia

Photography: Drew Castelhano, Charleston, South Carolina

Published in: Atlanta Style & Design

Website: drewcphoto.com