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By KLI
The Camp Everyone Wants Isn't a Miniature Version of the House Most people start their camp with the best of intentions: take what works in the main hou...
Most people start their camp with the best of intentions: take what works in the main house and shrink it. Same kitchen layout, scaled down. Same great room, minus a few feet.
Same finishes, minus the ones that felt too precious for a place near the water. It sounds reasonable. It almost never delivers the thing people actually wanted, which was a place that feels different from home.
The camps that people genuinely love are designed as their own kind of building, with their own logic. That logic starts with how you use the place, and how you use a camp is nothing like how you use a house.
At home, everyone scatters. Bedrooms, offices, a den for the TV, a formal space nobody uses. A camp works the opposite way.
People pile into one or two rooms and stay there.
That means the great room does more work than any single room in a house, and it needs to hold more people doing more different things at once. Cards at the table, someone half-asleep on the sofa, three people cooking, a game on. A shrunken living room can't carry that.
It just gets loud and crowded.
So the first thing we plan for a camp isn't the finish palette. It's flow, seating count, and how many wet, sandy, hungry people the main space has to absorb on a Saturday without feeling like a bottleneck.
A house gets babied a little. A camp gets abused, cheerfully, and that's the whole point of a camp.
Wet swimsuits on the furniture. Fish cleaned nearby. Sunscreen, bug spray, grass, mud, the occasional cooler dragged across the floor.
When people try to bring house-grade materials into that environment, the space starts looking tired fast, and then they stop relaxing because they're worried about the upholstery.
The move is to specify materials that were built to take it and still look good: performance textiles, flooring that shrugs off water and grit, surfaces you can wipe down without a second thought. Done right, durable doesn't read as cheap or utilitarian. It reads as calm, because nobody in the room is guarding anything.
This is one of the areas we love most, and it's genuinely underserved. A lot of firms don't touch waterfront and camp work well, because it asks for a different toolkit than a primary residence.
You're designing for humidity and moisture. For a building that might sit empty for stretches and then fill up all at once. For sightlines to the water that should drive the whole floor plan instead of being an afterthought.
For the way light bounces off water and changes everything about how a color reads at four in the afternoon.
The waterfront and camp clients we work with at KLI usually come to us after they've already priced out the "shrink the house" version and realized it wasn't going to feel the way they pictured. Once we start with how they actually spend a weekend there, the plan looks completely different.
A camp exists to be a break. The design should protect that, not compete with it.
That shapes practical calls. Enough beds and enough bathrooms so a full house isn't a logistics headache. A kitchen sized for cooking with other people in it, because that's where everyone ends up.
A mudroom or transition zone so the outside stays outside. Storage for the gear that a camp actually accumulates: rods, life jackets, coolers, boots.
When those bones are right, the place runs itself and you get to relax the second you walk in. When they're wrong, the camp quietly becomes a second household to manage, which is the exact opposite of why anyone builds one.
Here's where the "miniature version" instinct hurts most: it flattens the personality out of the place. A camp is permission to be bolder, warmer, moodier, more collected than a primary home usually allows.
This is where a layered, character-rich approach earns its keep. Deeper colors that suit the light off the water. Pattern that hides a little wear and adds a lot of soul.
Pieces that look like they were gathered over years, because a camp should feel like it has a history even when it's brand new.
We design every project around the client first, not a single look we impose. But a camp is often the place where people finally let a design have some nerve, and it's usually the room they're proudest of.
Camps almost always involve building or renovating, and waterfront construction has real constraints that shape the interior early. Elevation, moisture management, how mechanical systems get run, where you can and can't put weight or plumbing. If those get solved without the interior in mind, you end up with a beautiful plan that can't actually be built, or a built shell that fights the layout you wanted.
For clients who need construction alongside design, there's a genuine design-build pathway available through our sister company, Black Label Developments, so the design intent and the build side stay connected instead of getting handed off and reinterpreted by a separate contractor.
That connection matters more on the water than almost anywhere else, because the site itself is calling more of the shots.
The best camp brief we ever get isn't a Pinterest board. It's a client telling us what a perfect Saturday there looks like: who's coming, what they do all day, where everyone ends up at night. That's the real program, and it's why the finished camp feels nothing like a shrunken house.
A house is designed for your everyday. A camp is designed for your escape from it. Treat them as the same building and you get a smaller version of your regular life.
Treat them as two different animals and you get the place everyone actually wants to be.