Category Archives: Home Design

When you’re designing your own home, it’s a chance to create a space that’s both beautiful and functional. Rely on us for great design tips!

Secondary Spaces, Primary Value

| June 1, 2025

A custom carriage house or accessory dwelling unit (ADU) offers more than just extra space. They can bring a story, a style, and a stunning new purpose to your property.

Smart Spaces for Guests, Family & More

Carriage houses get their name from days gone by when carriages and horses were kept in a large outbuilding with additional living quarters above. Traditionally, modern carriage houses combine multi-vehicle garage storage with a second-level apartment or guest suite. However, we can design any custom carriage house to meet the needs of your property and lifestyle. CONTINUE READING

Step-by-Step Guide to the Custom Home Building Process

| May 5, 2025

When it comes to building a custom home, a well-structured schedule isn’t just helpful—it’s essential. With so many moving parts involved in design, permitting, material production, and construction, having a clear and realistic timeline helps everyone stay aligned and on track. A thoughtful schedule sets expectations, minimizes delays, and allows for better coordination between you, your Beaver Mountain team, and your contractor. We believe that transparency and planning are key to a successful homebuilding experience, and it all starts with understanding the timeline. With clear communication, expert guidance, and realistic expectations, the process becomes straightforward and even enjoyable. CONTINUE READING

Beaver Mountain’s Commitment to Sustainability and Eco-Friendly Homes

| May 2, 2025

At Beaver Mountain, sustainability isn’t a trend—it’s a core value woven into every home we design and build. From thoughtful material sourcing to energy-efficient engineering, we believe your home should reflect not only your lifestyle, but also your values.

Purposeful Design, Built to Last

We design every home with longevity, performance, and energy efficiency at its core. Our homes aren’t just visually striking—they’re engineered to handle the Northeast’s seasonal extremes while meeting or exceeding stringent energy codes. That includes tighter building envelopes, innovative insulation strategies, and energy systems thoughtfully tailored to your specific site and lifestyle. From positioning your home to capture passive solar gain to designing overhangs that offer natural shading in summer, every detail is considered. We offer energy-smart options such as high-performance windows, advanced air-sealing techniques, and renewable energy integration like solar panels or geothermal systems. Thoughtful design not only lowers your energy use and long-term costs, but it also creates a home that’s naturally comfortable, resilient, and built for the future. CONTINUE READING

Custom Home Building in the Finger Lakes: Where Luxury Meets Nature

| April 30, 2025

The Finger Lakes region of New York is a place where nature, culture, and craftsmanship come together. Known for its pristine lakes, world-class wineries, and charming towns, the area offers a lifestyle that blends luxury with simplicity. If you’re considering building a home here, a custom-built home in the Finger Lakes gives you the freedom to design a space that reflects your lifestyle, values, and vision. CONTINUE READING

Find Your Style: Small Homes, Big Personality

| April 30, 2025

In a world that often equates “more” with “better,” there’s a quiet but powerful movement choosing a different path — living well with less. Smaller homes, particularly those under 2,000 square feet, offer more than just efficient layouts and lower utility bills. They reflect a shift toward sustainability, intentional design, and a lifestyle that values quality over quantity. Whether you’re building your forever home or downsizing with purpose, a thoughtfully designed small home can provide everything you need, without the environmental cost of excess square footage. CONTINUE READING

Understanding Turnkey Pricing for Custom Homes

| November 27, 2024

Beaver Mountain homes are custom-designed for your property and lifestyle. We don’t offer “kits” or standard plans/models. Instead, we create unique homes tailored to your vision, site, and preferences. The cost of our premium materials package is just one part of the equation. Turnkey pricing, which refers to the full cost to complete your home (excluding land and land-specific work like septic, utilities, and landscaping), includes everything needed to make your home move-in ready: labor, materials, finishes, and systems. CONTINUE READING

Featured Home: Wayfarer Lodge

| November 27, 2024

Our team recently had the pleasure of catching up with two Beaver Mountain clients who built the gorgeous Wayfarer Lodge back in 2014. Nestled amongst the Catskill Mountains, The Wayfarer Lodge takes our classic Lodge floor plan and gives it a modern twist. Owners Dean and John split their time between Upstate NY and Florida and wanted a perfectly tailored log home that would be a summertime oasis when they needed to beat the tropical heat. This custom log home is truly a work of art both inside and out! CONTINUE READING

Timber Components for Contractors

| October 8, 2024

When you think of Beaver Mountain, the first thing that most likely pops into your mind is our custom crafted full-home projects, but did you know that we offer a wide selection of timber components for builders too? From exterior details like trusses, corners, and siding to interior details like accent beams and custom staircases; we can provide the one-of-a-kind handcrafted timber components for whatever your building project requires. Let Beaver Mountain be your go-to trusted source for high quality and perfectly crafted timbers for every project. CONTINUE READING

Home Design for Retiring-In-Place

| February 16, 2024

Are you dreaming of retiring to a gorgeous custom crafted home surrounded by breathtaking views and the relaxing atmosphere of nature all around you? Perhaps you have a family cabin on a beloved piece of property and would like to transform the space into a one-of-a-kind wood home. When it comes to designing the dream home for your golden years, there are a few things to consider ensuring you’ll be happy and comfortable for many years to come. CONTINUE READING

Reduce your wood home maintenance with these tips!

| January 26, 2024

When you move into your custom crafted log or timber home, the last thing you want to worry about is filling your precious free time with home maintenance projects. There are several details that can be incorporated into the design of your log home in order to minimize the amount of maintenance your home will need. We had the opportunity to chat with Beaver Mountain’s own Drew Prochazka, Vice President of Business Development, to share his personal experience of log home maintenance. According to Drew, “While it’s true that log homes require a certain type of maintenance, there’s no such thing as a maintenance free home”. Even conventionally built homes require regular maintenance to last for years. As someone who has lived in a Beaver Mountain log home for two decades and has worked within the log home industry for the past 21 years, Drew knows a thing or two about taking care of a log home. CONTINUE READING

Why Site-Specific Design Matters

| August 1, 2023

The dream of owning a custom-built log, wood, or timber frame home often goes hand in hand with the dream of living in harmony with the natural landscape, whether it’s nestled in the mountains, overlooking a glistening lake, or surrounded by peaceful woodlands. The beauty of log home living lies not only in the craftsmanship of the structure but in the daily experience of connecting with the outdoors. CONTINUE READING

Tips for Designing Your Outdoor Spaces

| May 17, 2023

One of the most important components of the home design and build process is factoring in landscaping and hardscaping to your property. We had the pleasure of chatting with Kyle Palmer from Palmer Contracting and Hardscaping to discuss why those are an important part of the process for homeowners to consider. Kyle is an expert in his field and offered some great insight into the process to help us better understand the application and functionality of both. CONTINUE READING

Creating a Great Room Vision Board

| March 6, 2023
Mood Board for Great Rooms

Creating a vision board (also referred to as a mood board) is a great way to start your log or timber frame home design planning.  These visual representations of your taste will help us have a clear direction before we start to design your home. These boards can be as simple as a Pinterest page account or as complex as a notebook filled with sketches, notes and printouts. You can check out our Gallery and Floorplan pages, Instagram or Facebook for lots of Beaver Mountain home inspiration. The sky’s the limit! CONTINUE READING

One of the 20 Best Custom Home Builders

| January 20, 2022
Beaver Mountain Log Homes Custom Home Builders Country Cubco Timber Home

We’re proud to be included in the Top 20 Best Custom Home Builders in Upstate NY by Home Builder Digest! They highlighted our Country Cubco custom built home, a ski lodge in the Catskill Mountains of New York designed to host friends and family.    The Country Cubco Timber Home is a perfect home for entertaining, with a large open concept living space, dining for 12 and a large wraparound deck that is accessible from the beautiful French doors in the living room. A wall of windows lets in natural light and passive solar heating in the winter months. During the summer, simply open the doors to feel the mountain breezes. A double sided fireplace is an unusual, but beautiful, feature. One side opens to the living room, the other to outdoor living room under a porch. The area is designed to allow you to enjoy 3 season outdoor living and has been a very popular design option lately. To see the entire Country Cubco gallery and floor plan, click here! CONTINUE READING

Log Home Interior Design Trends

| May 7, 2021

We’ve seen some interesting trends lately in log home interior design as our clients are creating their homes! Here’s a few of our favorites…

Mixing Bold Patterns

Using Primary Colors

Wallpaper & Murals

Cottagecore 

Comfort is Key!

Let’s take a look at those in depth!

Mixing Bold Patterns

Bold patterns are a great way to give your home some personality! You can go for a floral or maybe a geometric pattern to give any room that “pop”. But in 2021, we’ve seen clients mixing those patterns together! You can choose a common color palette, then mix and match to your heart’s content! CONTINUE READING

Future-Proofing Your Home

| November 11, 2020

Here in the Catskills, we’ve seen a huge rise in the numbers of people building their dream vacation homes. They rent them while they’re not using them, with the long term goal of having it as a retirement home. If that’s something you’re thinking of, there are a few things you should keep in mind. CONTINUE READING

Tips for an Eco-Friendly Home

| September 17, 2020

Many of our clients are looking to include eco-friendly, green features into their homes. As you’re planning your new custom home (or just getting ideas for your current home), here are a few tips and ideas to reduce your carbon footprint and stay healthier in the process!

Kitchen

Use natural cleaning products. Vinegar, baking soda, rubbing alcohol make a fantastic window and glass cleaner. Lemon juice can help remove stains from countertops (and is fantastic as an adhesive remover too!) Baking soda freshens up carpets. Not only are these all extremely effective, they are cheap and almost always at hand! Vinegar and a bit of dish soap is also quite effective as a weed killer. A great option especially if you have pets or small children around. CONTINUE READING

Beaver Mountain Log Homes Kitchen Design Tips Kitchen Island

Kitchen Design Tips: Part 2

| July 8, 2020

Last time we started talking to Carol from Northeast Cabinet Center about ways to increase your storage and  keep your kitchen organized. (Click here to read that post!) Today she’s back and has some more tips for us!

Drawers

Roll out drawers are a really easy way to access everything in your cabinets and come in several widths. These are very helpful in the kitchen to pull your appliances, pots/pans, etc. out for an easy access. No more crawling on your hands and knees retrieving an item in the back of the cabinet. They also aid in keeping a better inventory of your supplies since the items are readily available with an easy glide out drawer. CONTINUE READING