Open House
Drive an hour northwest of Birmingham across rippled farmland, through forests impenetrably thick with yellow pine, down serpentine country roads beside mossy cliffs, around the coves of 21,200-acre Smith Lake, and you’ll arrive at the modern weekend retreat of Carter and Lynlee Hughes. But finding the front door of the Magic City couple’s home is an entirely more difficult matter, because it doesn’t really exist. It’s that sort of architectural unconventionality, carved precisely into a former cow pasture, that makes the Hugheses’ lake house remarkable.
