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In the great room, on the interior of the prow, four curved knee braces frame a view of the tree from the second-floor loft. "Curved knee braces are more expensive than straight ones," Beverly says. "So Herb and I decided to use them only where they'd show the best. I loved using them since they're so graceful." The prow's expansive glass walls also allow ample sunshine to pour "right on through the great room and up to the loft," Herb says. "That's why the home is so sunny and bright."

The sunroom is Beverly's special retreat. Since it's located on the southeast corner of the home, it gets plenty of sunshine all day long. Easy-care, marble-green tile covers the floor, and washable wicker furniture makes this room easy to maintain and hassle free.

The home encompasses three and one-half stories. The finished basement features two guest bedrooms, a bath, and a recreation room with a wood-burning, inserted fireplace, a bar, an entertainment center and pool table. "This is the area where we spend most of our time and entertain our guests," Terry says. The master bedroom suite and bath are the only rooms on the second floor. The staircase, crafted by Design Stairs of Sandwich, Illinois, leads from the great room to the open loft, where the couple can either curl up with a good book or simply enjoy the wonderful view of the river. Just above the master bedroom, accessible by a ship's ladder, is a small alcove created by the pitch in the roof. The couple's youngest guests gravitate to this area. A futon awaits anyone brave enough to sleep up there. "The only thing I tell everybody," Terry says, "is remember where you are when you get up in the middle of the night."

The main level is where the timber framing shines. Posts and beams hewn from a blend of red and white oak frame walls covered with insulated panels supplied by Great Lakes Insulspan. The 7-by-9-inch timbers were coated with Swedish oil to give them a polished finish. Framing is found in almost every room on this level, including Terry's professional-style kitchen, with its AGA stove and glistening white countertops. "Terry likes to cook," Beverly says, "so we had a kitchen designer work with us to make the aisles wider so we wouldn't run into each other." One feature that attracted the couple to the design of the main floor was the openness -- with the kitchen, dining room and great room all facing one another. "We wanted to be able to see from the kitchen to the living room," Terry says, "and not have any walls in between."

The wood used to timber frame the couple's master bedroom, as well as the rest of the home, is textured with a variety of knots, checks and other character marks. "More than once during the first year," Terry says, "we were awakened in the middle of the night as the timbers cracked."

The master bath is the symbol of understated elegance. White wall and flooring tiles mixed with the black-and-white checkerboard pattern in the tub surround meld beautifully with the simple lines of the room's pine-panel ceiling and timber-framed walls.

While the couple loves the openness, they realized they needed some closed-in spaces for storage. Herb came up with the idea of converting the dormer space over the three-car garage into a storage area. Since the master bedroom shares a wall with this space, a door was installed for direct access to it. Steps at the other end lead down into the garage.
Decorating the home was easy, Beverly notes. "The house is so beautiful inside with the pine paneling on the ceiling and the timbers along the walls," she says. "We have very little decoration on the windows since the whole point is to look outside."

Mixing antiques with colorful Oriental-style rugs, Beverly used oversized couches and furnishings to give the home a feeling of intimacy despite its size. "I'd say to anyone who wants to build a timber-frame home: The wood is so pretty, what you really need to do is under-decorate. The posts and beams are decoration enough."