A designer and a creative client team up to reinvent farmhouse style at this stunning Leelanau Peninsula property. Take a peek inside.

This article first appeared in Traverse Northern Michigan. Find this story and more when you explore our magazine library. Want Traverse delivered to your door or inbox monthly? View our print subscription and digital subscription options.

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The seeds of this project were sown many years ago when the homeowner toured a show-house in Lake Forest, Illinois, that was designed by Chicago-based designer Elizabeth Drake. “She asked me,” Drake recalls, “‘If we ever build a farmhouse, will you design it?’”

A number of years later, the homeowners were ready to build that farmhouse on land they purchased in the heart of the Leelanau Peninsula. The couple had definite ideas about what they wanted in this home. First and foremost, it needed to be a layout that welcomed their four married children and their grandchildren for visits all year—including this family’s all-important holiday gathering. “That was the driver of this house,” Drake says. “A place for every married child and their children with plenty of space to make them feel welcome.” That plan needed to include a kitchen big enough for the 10 adults and five children in this family of cooks and foodies to gather in—and a separate dining room in the great room where the fuss and muss of cooking could be left behind for long, relaxed dinners.

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Beyond those wishes, the couple wanted an exterior and interior design that fit the peninsula’s bucolic farm country—a design that would be as natural and organic as the large garden that they had already cultivated on the property. To that end, Traverse City-based architect Jim Elkins, now retired but then with the firm Strong, Drury & Elkins, designed the classic whiteboard-and-batten farmhouse complete with a fieldstone chimney and foundation and metal roof. A connected garage and a separate building that houses an office and art studio are painted a perfect barn red. The home’s interior was a happy and seamless collaboration between Drake, Elkins and the homeowners. “What I love best about my work is when I am able to design a home from the ground up—from the finishes to the furniture,” Drake says of the project. “When the finishes and the furnishings play together, there is an alchemy.”

As Drake explains, that alchemy began with the color choices. The homeowner, an artist, embraces bright, bold color and she charged Drake with basing the home’s palette on a sunny yellow (think: the yolks of farm-raised eggs!) and green, the shade of new plant shoots in the spring. Barn red and sky blue would be ancillary colors. “The trick was to keep the look from getting cute—that is a slippery slope,” Drake says.

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Related Read: Barn Elevated: A Traverse City Architect’s Modern Take on a Timeless Design

Drake succeeded in avoiding the cute factor by grounding the home in natural materials: a mix of white oak and slate floors, wood-beamed ceilings and granite-faced fireplaces and chimneys. Assorted antiques that Drake and the homeowner curated from the couple’s home in Chicago added to the timeless feel. Among the pieces are an early last-century portrait of a relative, a pine console that Drake turned into a powder room vanity and a primitive-style wooden statue of Abe Lincoln (a nod to the couple’s home state of Illinois).

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Pops of color and fresh twists on traditional elements are key to the home’s overall style. The sunny yellow makes its appearance on interior barn doors, including one that disguises the refrigerator, as well as on wainscoting in the front entrance. Likewise, a classic sofa is upholstered in spring green-and-white dotted fabric. Wallpaper with motifs including fresh green-and-white buffalo plaid (in a nook of the kitchen), birch trees hung with pears (a bathroom), whimsical cows (another bathroom) and charming chickens (the laundry room) add playfulness to the traditional home. The homeowner pitched in, painting a huge antique buffet sky blue and coral.

The home is a lively, comfortable sanctuary in all seasons of the year. But it really proved its mettle when six adults and one small child quarantined in it during the pandemic lockdown. “The house functioned like a champ,” Drake says.