Issue link: https://alabamapower.uberflip.com/i/773040
8 a p c s hor e l i n e s.c om | 2016 Vol :3 Of course, by 25 this "boy" had designed hundreds of homes. Growing up in a series of Alabama sawmill towns, where housing was board-and-batten bungalow style – every one like the next – he started drawing house plans at the age of five. "My little heart knew that the world was bigger than that," he recalls. "I was always organizing and fantasizing about space. I became infatuated." He created his escape plans, his dreams on paper, every day; he also walked construction sites with his father, studying how things came together and savoring the feel and aroma of the industry. "I was an architect essentially long before I even knew what the word was." From here the timetable tumbles forward. The first design that came to physical life: seventh grade, a $100 commission from a rich woman in town. The first professional job: ninth grade with a local architect (McAlpine, excused from afternoon classes, reported there at 1 p.m. each school day). The official degree: Auburn University, which created a second major of interior design for its promising star, enabling two degrees in six years. "That level of concentration for somebody like me who was single-visioned and wanting to live the life of an architect was heaven," he says of the Auburn years. After his birthday-at-lake epiphany and then the house he called his own for 10 years, McAlpine took on his first significant commission on a peninsula in the Trillium area. "I borrowed parts and pieces from Adirondack, from England and from romantic structures I knew in my heart and created a house that immediately changed the temperature of architecture on the lake," McAlpine says. "Up until the '80s, the best houses you might've seen were more akin to Hilton Head but now a lot of houses started shifting themselves stylistically to drift more toward the Trillium design." The essential mood was simple, stemming from a realization McAlpine has embraced from that first commission onward. "I think a lake is a very different kind of place, not where you drag your town wares and your ego to it," he begins. "For me, the lake is church and sanctuary, so consequently I think one of the primary jobs of the house is not to show Above: Photo courtesy of SuSan Sully — The patio wall uses rocks harvested from the area to further anchor the house to the landscape. Left: Photo courtesy of SuSan Sully — Natural materials such as linen, hemp and wood complement the natural setting of the house.