Deep in the alabama woods, where oaks and cedars give way to water, where full-throated bullfrogs bellow in the obsidian night, there lives a house. Or maybe more of a house-ish nymph—a mystical, thatch-roofed inhabitant of the forest. With lozenge-window eyes, a cloak of darkest ebony, and 11-foot finials gently bowing up toward the sky, this enchanted being is the creation of architect Bobby McAlpine and his partner, Blake Weeks, both Alabama natives. McAlpine, for his part, had been on the hunt for decades for the “consummate lake property,” he explains, “one enveloped by water, a spot that could hold some romantic building or series of buildings.”
Though he hadn’t grown up going to lakes, the architect was “smitten” when he first discovered Lake Martin in his early 20s. “It…
