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Some projects begin with a brief. This one began with a landscape.
A wooded hillside along Serenbe Road, Georgia. A gentle slope. A canopy of mature trees. When the client approached Design With Frank Design Team for a luxury custom home on this site, the land was already pointing toward the answer. The architecture simply had to follow.
Serenbe is one of the most celebrated communities in the South, and this southern luxury home is designed to honor both the landscape and the lifestyle it offers.
The Concept: Three Volumes, One Home
Two solid barn-like masses. One transparent glass pavilion in between.
The outer volumes are clad in dark vertical wood siding with steeply pitched gable roofs, grounded and restrained from the entry side. The central glass pavilion connects them and serves as the entry point, its floor-to-ceiling glazing immediately framing the private backyard courtyard and infinity pool the moment you step inside. It is a threshold designed to orient, pause, and reveal.
This three-volume composition is the foundation of the entire custom floor plan design, separating social life, arrival, and private life into distinct architectural expressions while reading as a single cohesive farm style house from every angle.
The Approach
From the entry side, this farm style house settles quietly into the Georgia hillside, single-story in appearance, restrained, unhurried.
A curved gravel drive leads past the detached garage to a central entry point. The solid outer walls on either side reveal almost nothing of what lies behind. The reveal comes later.
The Backyard
Step through the glass pavilion, and the landscape opens up.
The hillside drops away to the east, exposing the full two-story height of the bedroom wing and framing a private infinity pool nestled into the slope. The three building volumes wrap three sides of the outdoor space, creating a secluded courtyard that balances indoor-outdoor living with complete privacy. Natural boulders, meadow plantings, and a gravel garden complete the setting.
This is the heart of this luxury custom home in Serenbe, a backyard that feels both intimate and expansive, sheltered by architecture and opened to the Georgia landscape.
Light and Living
The western building houses the living and dining spaces. The living room opens on three sides with floor-to-ceiling glass under a soaring gable roof, anchored by a full-height stone fireplace wall. Sliding glass doors connect directly to the pool terrace, making indoor-outdoor living effortless year-round.
The formal dining room in the glass pavilion is wrapped on two sides with glazing, with views into the central courtyard garden. A breakfast nook and kitchen complete the social zone.
Retreat
All bedrooms are located in the eastern building, deliberately separated from the social zone by the glass pavilion corridor. This spatial separation is one of the defining features of a well-considered luxury custom home, where privacy and social life are given equal architectural weight.
The master suite occupies the upper level with an L-shaped balcony, two walk-in closets, and a master bathroom conceived as a floating glass volume that extends beyond the building envelope with views on three sides. Two guest bedrooms, each with en-suite baths and covered balconies, sit below. A basement playroom opens onto a sunlit eastern terrace, using the natural hillside slope to bring daylight deep into the lower level. Every detail of the bedroom wing reflects the standard of a southern luxury home, where comfort, privacy, and connection to landscape are inseparable.
The Roof in Between
The central glass pavilion presented one of the most interesting roof house design challenges of the project: how to roof a transparent volume that connects two solid barn masses on either side.
The selected direction is a shallow-slope shed roof with a unified, sweeping eave that extends 2 to 4 feet beyond the walls on each side, reaching out to incorporate the adjoining corridors and tie all three volumes under a continuous roofline. The gentle 1:12 to 2:12 pitch keeps the profile low and in harmony with the flanking gable roofs.
The generous eave projection shades the floor-to-ceiling glazing below, reducing heat gain while preserving the pavilion's transparency. Rainwater drainage is fully integrated into the assembly, keeping the exterior profile clean. The result is a roof house design that performs efficiently and holds the three-volume composition together.
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