Thom Filicia Creates Adirondack Getaway

June 25, 2014  by in Designer Weekly   

Decorator Thom Filicia has designed lake houses before, but the Manhattan talent had never worked on an Adirondack great camp. Those palatial yet rustic compounds, which had their heyday a century ago, were private havens in upstate New York where the families and friends of Gilded Age tycoons could swim, canoe, hike, fish, play tennis, and share three hearty meals a day without ever leaving the property.

"It’s an all-embracing, old-fashioned way of vacationing," says Filicia, who collaborated with architect Arthur Hanlon of the Connecticut firm Shope Reno Wharton on a new great camp on Upper Saranac Lake in the six-million-acre Adirondack Park. The clients, a California couple with two children, envisioned the place as a summer escape that would be the antithesis of their go-go West Coast lives. "They wanted to be in their own bubble," the designer explains of the getaway, known as Big Rock.

Located on a peninsula that once hosted the Wawbeek resort, a modest lodge with several cabins, the compound incorporates established view corridors because New York State’s Adirondack Park Agency discourages shoreline tree removal. 

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