Once a ranch house, now their own Sierra lodge

Sunset, Jan, 1990

Once a ranch house, now their own Sierra lodge Some buildings don't live up to their sites. This was the case with the ranch house you see at far left, nondescript and a bit improbable for its site on the shore of Lake Tahoe. Its scale looked wrong for a High Sierra setting, and its design failed to take advantage of a potentially spectacular lakefront view.

Homeowners Bebe and B.J. Cassin needed to remodel to gain more space. They used that necessity as an opportunity to capitalize on the setting and improve the layout of the house.

Originally, two separate wings were linked by an open breezeway. This was fine in summer. But during winter, the Cassins shivered through snowdrifts to get from the living room in one wing to the bedrooms in another. And the lowpitched ranch-house roofs were inadequate for Tahoe snow loads.

Filling in the breezeway turned it into an entry and family room linking the two parts of the house.

In the living room, they raised the roof with an 18-foot-high gable, making it possible to open up the lake-facing end in a window wall. The central panel of this three-part window is a glassy bay that juts out 3 feet into the view. New steel posts and pine-covered steel beams stiffen the steeper, heavier roof. Thermal glazing and R-38 insulation conserve heat in the lofty new room.

The old galley kitchen was enlarged by adding a 12-foot-deep, four-sided window bay with a pitched ceiling supported by a column of peeled lodgepole pine.

Architect Andrea Kincaid, structural engineer Louis Woods, and contractor John Bervid collaborated on the design.