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"View Slideshow\n\nDecorator Thom Filicia has designed lake houses before, but the Manhattan talent had never worked on an Adirondack great camp. Those palatial yet rustic compounds, which had their heyday a century ago, were private havens in upstate New York where the families and friends of Gilded Age tycoons could swim, canoe, hike, fish, play tennis, and share three hearty meals a day without ever leaving the property.\n\n\"It's an all-embracing, old-fashioned way of vacationing,\" says Filicia, who collaborated with architect Arthur Hanlon of the Connecticut firm Shope Reno Wharton on a new great camp on Upper Saranac Lake in the six-million-acre Adirondack Park. The clients, a California couple with two children, envisioned the place as a summer escape that would be the antithesis of their go-go West Coast lives. \"They wanted to be in their own bubble,\" the designer explains of the getaway, known as Big Rock.\n\nLocated on a peninsula that once hosted the Wawbeek resort, a modest lodge with several cabins, the compound incorporates established view corridors because New York State's Adirondack Park Agency discourages shoreline tree removal. The master-suite wing, therefore, is angled off the porte cochere of the graceful shingle-and-stone main house, making it appear to be a separate cottage; opposite it, on the other side of a curving drive, stands a three-car garage/guesthouse. \"Each building has its own distinct orientation and vistas,\" Hanlon says, noting that the two-story main house's generously windowed protrusions (they contain stairwells) were inspired by the park's fire-lookout towers.\n\nAfter the site plan was created, Filicia began working with Hanlon on the interiors. The home blends what the architect calls \"simple, honest materials\" in accordance with the local vernacular: cedar shingles for the exteriors, fieldstone for the fireplaces, and birch logs for the balusters. Says Filicia, \"The clients wanted the look to be authentic but with a twist, and I wanted to make sure the architecture popped.\" So he painted some walls and ceilings blue, green, or dark brown. \"The oak beams seem to float against these colorful backdrops,\" the decorator says.\n\nSince Filicia has lived in two lakeside residences over the years, he understood how to furnish the vaulted multipurpose great room for maximum enjoyment. \"It needed to be layered, but not haphazard or random,\" he says. At one end is the living area, with a Knole sofa and button-tufted velvet daybeds. In the center is a games area, where low-slung furniture allows for unobstructed views of the lake. The other end of the room is for dining and features a twig-clad sideboard commissioned from Barney Bellinger, an acclaimed regional furnituremaker. \"It was important to have a connection with local craftsmanship,\" says Filicia, adding that many classic great camps possessed an eclectic, well-traveled air, hence Big Rock's judicious sprinkling of Indonesian side chairs and Moroccan and Turkish carpets.\n\nThough the public rooms on the ground floor are undeniably urbane, the children's areas and the garage's second-floor guest accommodations showcase the decorator's hallmark sense of whimsy. In the son's room, Filicia repurposed a billboard from the old Wawbeek lodge into a wall-size mural that resembles a picture window taking in the lake and surrounding peaks. The daughter's room is a magical woodland, its wallpaper patterned with white trees and birds, while the guesthouse's bunk room and adjoining bath have fire-engine-red wainscot that is meant to be unforgettably vivid. \"I wanted the suite to be a place that a seven-year-old kid would remember for a lifetime,\" the designer says.\n\nWindows on three sides make the master bedroom, on the second floor, feel like a tree house, and shingled walls play up the indoor-outdoor ambience. So does the nearby sleeping porch, where capacious twin sofa beds hang from the ceiling. (The beds' rope apparatuses, which ensure they rock gently, were concocted by a set designer.) For the master bath, unlacquered brass fixtures were left outside for several months so the metal would develop a weathered patina. The large, welcoming room encourages lingering, with a soaking tub and a honey-color Swedish Empire secretary that serves as a dressing table.\n\nAs at all great camps, outbuildings are crucial to the property's gestalt. Down on the private beach, an existing structure became a games house with a Pop Art attitude once Filicia painted its interior white and installed royal-blue Foosball and Ping-Pong tables and sunflower-yellow butterfly chairs. Hanlon also created a boathouse with the estate's name spelled out in branches on the water-facing entablature. The architect explains that the building, which stands in the lake and is reached by a small bridge, was erected during one of upstate New York's famously harsh winters. \"We put the pilings down in the fall,\" he says, \"and then it was constructed while the lake was frozen.\" In addition to sheltering a Chris-Craft launch, the boathouse features a spacious elevated terrace perfect for sunbathing or evening cocktails.\n\nFrom leisurely hours on screened porches embraced by pine trees to water sports and boat tours around the lake, Big Rock provides its owners with precisely what they wanted\u2014a true change of pace. It also means that guests rarely come just for a weekend. \"People tend to move in for a week at a time,\" Filicia observes with a smile. \"It's the real summer-camp experience.\"\n\nTour the palatial Adirondack Mountain lake house retreat."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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