Located on an estuary of Prien Lake, straddling the Louisiana/Texas border, Pelican House exudes an elevated cabin aesthetic. Clad in Western red cedar and embellished with Texas Lueder limestone columns, broad overhangs, and exposed wood beams, it's a stunning bayou home anchored by glass walls that connect it to the surrounding landscape – and keep it safe when Mother Nature rages.
"It's a very picturesque location, but as you would imagine, it's also a very stormy one," says architect Winn Wittman, who designed the home for indoor-outdoor living in the Gulf Coast climate. Embraced and hammered by nature, Pelican House has withstood four hurricanes, both during and after construction. "The only evidence of the hurricanes is that the wood, which was initially smooth, now has a sandblasted appearance," Wittman says.
Home to a doctor, his nurse wife, and their five children, the 7,500-square-foot house features sliding glass doors, glass walls, and custom-size windows to create a seamless connection between the interior and the exterior, offering the family expansive views of the surrounding wetlands and the distant bridge linking Louisiana to Texas.
It's a large home, but it's also broken up into a series of pavilions, which gives it a more human scale. Two shed roofs frame a gabled volume, with glass panels connecting to slightly elevated roof planes.
–Winn Wittman
The living room features a 24-foot-high ceiling with floor-to-ceiling glass. One of the most stunning features of the home is the way the living room seems to flow right into the lake. "We wanted the living room to connect to the water, and we designed the home in such a way that there is an 82-foot-long swimming pool with a negative edge that visually blends with the water of the lake below," Wittman says. "So, when you're standing in the living room, you feel as though the lake is coming right up to you."
A large glass pivot door provides a memorable entry. "It's quite striking when you walk up to the house," Wittman says. "Having specified a lot of these large pivot doors, I know that many of them easily go out of adjustment or they begin to scrape or bind, and we haven't had any such issues with the Western Window Systems product."
Designing for a large family, Wittman says it was critical to "create areas for connection and areas for privacy." He achieved this by designing spaces for the kids upstairs, while giving the parents a separate wing accessed through a glassed-in corridor. To ensure even more privacy while maintaining a connection to nature, Wittman added floor-to-ceiling windows in the main bathroom, which open onto a private courtyard shielded from the neighboring golf course by dense vegetation.
The home's moving glass walls are protected by large overhangs that extend slightly over balconies. These balconies shelter the patio below, which has a large TV that swings down into the outdoor area, essentially creating an indoor-outdoor media room.
Facilitating indoor-outdoor living in a humid subtropical climate requires sliding glass doors to function as seamlessly as the connection between inside and out. "Obviously, you've got insects close to the river, and the doors need to be easily opened and closed," Wittman says. "Given the size of the glass, we wanted to select a sliding door that rolled freely. And the Western Windows Systems slider is very easy to open and close, even in these larger panels."
Originally published in Arch Daily
