Since a house on Friends Lake was completed in 2022, it has experienced two, once-in-every five hundred years storms. Fortunately for the house, and of greater importance, for its owners, the architect is Mike Phinney and his forty-person, Saratoga-based firm, Phinney Design Group, which builds for exigencies such as these. Phinney and his team of LEED-accredited professionals chose to design with nature’s new norms, rather than in defiance of them.
“The site informs the design,” said Phinney, a graduate of Lake George High School and RPI.
“You look at the topography. What’s coming from the mountain is a gutter that swells with water after a heavy rain. We didn’t just work around it. We celebrated it.
