Nothing is worse than a vacation house that’s just as complicated and cut off from the outdoors as so many year-round houses have become. How can you get away from it all if you bring it all with you? How can you get closer to nature — which might be the reason to stay at the beach or in the mountains — if you block it out with air-conditioning, television, and carpeted rooms with little windows?

Along the shores of Lake Martin an hour north of Montgomery, Alabama, people have taken to building second homes with all the amenities. It’s understandable and perhaps inevitable, but it isn’t for Martha Jane and husband M.T. “Most people around here want air-conditioning, but that’s not how we think,” says their son, architect Taylor Dawson III, the designer in the family. Taylor orchestrated a remodeling and upgrading of the cabin his parents built some 30 years ago, determined to keep the barefoot spirit of the original, which was, as he puts it, “one step ahead of camping out.”

Just a big old screened porch

The cabin stands at the end of a 10-mile-long dirt road, on a south-facing spit of land surrounded by water on three sides. The family calls the place Land’s End. When M.T. first built it, it had a back-of-beyond quality to it, with exposed framing, no insulation, and a pantry stocked with dishes and glasses given away by the local gas station with a fill-up. There were two tiny bedrooms, a tight kitchen, a bath, and a small living room.

The essence of the cabin was a 12-ft.-wide screened porch that wrapped around three sides of the living room, each side facing the water. The family lived on the porch, and Taylor and his three sisters slept out there every night. When they came in from sailing, they’d hang wet sails to dry on the porch rafters.

It used to be that when it rained, everything on the porch got wet. To make the porch more weatherproof without diminishing its essential porchness, Taylor kept the screens but added ingenious flip-up windows between each framing stud, some 32 window sashes in all. The windows are raised with ropes attached to pulleys hung from struts extending from the eaves. They’re lowered with a second set of ropes running through little holes in the screens. The ropes are tied off to metal cleats, just like rigging on a sailboat. With the porch windows flipped up, the cabin remains open to the breezes.

Raising and lowering dozens of window sashes takes some effort, but the drooping ropes and upswept windows have the perfect degree of informality for a barefoot lake cabin.

Marc Vassallo received a degree in architecture from Cornell University before turning to writing full-time. He has published numerous magazine features, and co-wrote Inside the Not So Big House with best-selling author Sarah Susanka. Vassallo lives with his wife, Linda, and son, Nicky, in New Haven, Connecticut. Photos by: Ken Gutmaker