Firm Name: Wheeler Kearns Architects

Principal: Jon Heinert

Headquarters: 343 South Dearborn Street, Suite 200, Chicago, Illinois

Accolades: Forbes Architecture’s “America’s Top 200 Residential Architects,” 2025; Forbes Architecture’s “America’s Best-in-State Residential Architects,” 2025

House Name: Meadow Lane Retreat

Location: Lakeside, Michigan

Site Specifics: 2.55 acres of woodland overlooking Lake Michigan

Area & Layout: 8,900 square feet, 5 BR, 3 BA

Architectural Photographer: Steve Hall (hallmerrick.com)

AChicago couple looked to Jon Heinert, of Wheeler Kearns Architects, to design a lake house that harnessed the beauty of the natural world. His carefully calibrated solution utilizes simple building blocks to achieve complex goals.

RICHARD OLSEN, Forbes Senior Editor, Architecture: In terms of scale, scope and identity, how does this project fit into your overall body of residential work?

JON HEINERT: What defines our studio isn't a signature style—it's a signature process. For every project, we develop multiple schemes with genuinely divergent ideas early on and use them to have an honest conversation with our clients about what they truly prioritize. With Meadow Lane Retreat, we presented four distinct schemes at the outset, each organizing the program differently relative to the bluff, the trees and the lake. What emerged from those conversations is a home that is uniquely and personally theirs—and that's really the thread that runs through everything we do.

OLSEN: Creatively, from a design problem-solving viewpoint, what are a few of the most satisfying solutions that came together here?

JON HEINERT: The three-volume arrangement is the solution that satisfies most, because it had to accomplish so many things simultaneously. It creates the deliberate streetside-to-lakeside transition, but those volumes are also managing privacy from the neighbors on either side while carefully framing views—to the lake, to the internal garden between the volumes, and out to the neighboring rear yards. It looks deceptively simple, but there was considerable calibration required to get all of that working together. And then the pavilion—the floating roof plane hovering above the clerestory, the limestone wall anchoring it to the earth, and the slatted-wood ceiling running continuously from outside to inside—those details work together to genuinely dissolve the boundary between interior and exterior, expanding the space in a way that feels both intentional and effortless.

OLSEN: And what’s next for the studio?

JON HEINERT: We have an interesting mix of work in the office right now at various stages of design and construction, across different scales and project types, which keeps our thinking fresh and cross-pollinating in ways that benefit everything we do. At the core, what we're always looking for is the same thing this project had—a compelling site, clients who are genuinely invested in the process, and a design problem worth solving carefully. When those things align, the work tends to find its own direction.

More from Forbes House of the Week

© Forbes