The Mountain House
A Colorado mountain lodge built on a Texas hillside — massive timber, natural stone, and twenty-four-foot vaulted ceilings rising above the lake. The neighbors call it the resort. The owners call it home.
A Mountain Home
at the Lake
The owners came to Ceci Bates through a referral — several people in the area pointed them in the same direction. They had a clear aesthetic vision: a home that looked and felt like a Colorado mountain lodge, with the timber, stone, and scale of something you would find on a hillside in the mountain west. But they wanted it at the lake, close to the Highport Marina where they keep their sailboat, in a hilly subdivision called Fossil Ridge where the terrain drops toward the water and the sunset views face west.
The lot was perfect for what they wanted. Set on a hill in a small valley, the property sits above its neighbors with unobstructed views — two minutes from the marina and the activity of the lake, but secluded enough that you could miss the entrance if you were not looking for it.
They wanted a home for themselves and for gathering — a son in college who would visit, friends who would come for weekends, a formal dining room for evenings, a bar and a coffee bar for mornings, a game room on the upper level, and a covered patio with an outdoor fireplace and kitchen. Every space would serve the life they were building at the lake.
Designed from
the Outside In
This home was designed in the opposite direction from most. Where The Transitional was designed from the inside out — floor plan first, exterior shaped to express it — The Mountain House started with the look. Roberth established the mountain aesthetic first: three monumental timber-framed gables, cedar beams more than twenty feet tall, natural stone at the base, stucco above to avoid siding or board-and-batten that would shift the home toward a farmhouse register. The mountain lodge had to read as a mountain lodge from every angle.
Then he worked inward, arranging the interior spaces within the exterior envelope — bedrooms on each side, the great room in the center rising through the full double height, a catwalk bridging the two wings at the upper level. The challenge was keeping the interior program organized in a way that preserved the mountain exterior without compromise.
The first sketch is where the story starts. Roberth produced a hand-drawn concept that captured the mountain aesthetic immediately. The wife’s response was to clap. The sketch became the reference they carried through the entire process, and the finished home honors it with remarkable fidelity.
Where the design demanded the most care was in the details: the alignment of windows across the rear elevation — upper, lower, and the three small windows above the covered patio — all arranged to create a composed facade from a composition of rooms at different levels. These alignments are invisible to a casual observer but essential to why the home feels resolved rather than assembled.
Stone That Does Not
Stop at the Door
One of Roberth's most distinctive decisions on this project was to carry the exterior stone inside. The same natural stone that clads the chimneys and the base of the exterior walls reappears on the interior staircase wall — visible through floor-to-ceiling windows from outside, and felt as a tactile surface from within. The boundary between inside and outside dissolves at the most vertical, most visible point of the home.
On the rear of the home, the team chose to put the stone inside rather than outside — so the owners would enjoy the texture and warmth of it daily, rather than seeing it only from the yard. The exterior became stucco; the interior became stone. It is an inversion that most visitors would never think to request, but once experienced, feels obvious.
Cathedral, Kitchen,
and Catwalk
The center of the home rises through a full double height — twenty-four feet at the peak of the vaulted ceiling, crossed by massive timber beams that give the space its mountain-lodge weight. The great room below is open, warm, and grounded: leather seating, wood floors, a stone fireplace, and windows on two sides pulling in the western light. Above, a catwalk bridges the two wings of the house, connecting the bedrooms on one side to the game room on the other.
The catwalk does more than connect. It defines the kitchen below without closing it off — creating a lower ceiling plane over the cooking area that provides coziness and a place to hang pendant lights, while the space still opens upward into the full vault beyond. You stand in the kitchen and feel contained but not confined. You look up and the living room soars.
At sunset, the western light enters through the upper windows and falls across the catwalk in long shadows. Walking across the bridge to the game room in the evening, you are suspended between the vaulted ceiling and the living room below, with the sunset filling the glass.
It is one of those architectural moments that only exists because someone thought to put a bridge where most people would put a wall.
Two Minutes from the Marina,
a World Away
The covered porch faces west over the rolling terrain of Fossil Ridge, with the lake beyond. The Highport Marina — one of the largest inland marinas in the country, holding a thousand boats — is less than two minutes away. The owners can be on the water in the time it takes to walk to the car. But from the porch, the activity of the marina, the road, the other homes below — none of it is visible. The home sits on its hill, above the landscape, looking out.
The outdoor living space was designed as a second phase — the house was already under construction when the team began designing the covered patio with its outdoor fireplace and kitchen. It became one of the most used spaces in the home: the stone chimney anchoring one end, the timber ceiling overhead, and a view that makes you forget you are in Texas.
A First Project, and
a Lasting Relationship
The Mountain House was Roberth’s first project as the sole architect on a Ceci Bates home — handling the client relationship from the first meeting through every phase of design, working remotely from Venezuela at the time, presenting concepts over video calls. The wife’s response to his first sketches set the tone for the entire project: she clapped. From that moment, the sketch became the north star, and every decision that followed served it.
The owners still love the house. Roberth and the team remain in contact. And the home itself — on its hilltop in Fossil Ridge, catching the sunset through its western windows, the neighbors still calling it the resort — stands as evidence that a strong vision, held faithfully from sketch to stone, produces a home that feels like it has always been there.
Project Details
Location · Fossil Ridge, near Highport Marina, Lake Texoma, Texas
Type · Primary lakehouse — Colorado mountain lodge aesthetic
Key Features · Three monumental timber-framed gables, cedar beams exceeding twenty feet, natural stone carried from exterior to interior staircase, 24-foot vaulted ceiling, catwalk bridging two wings, dual kitchen islands with breakfast nook, elevator, breezeway to garage, covered patio with outdoor fireplace and kitchen, western sunset orientation
Architect · Roberth Jordan
Interior Design · Heather Shields
Built by · Ceci Bates Custom Homes