Turned away from the road and toward the water.

Grand Heights sits at the top of a wooded dune road where the pavement narrows and the maples close overhead. The house appears at the end of it — concrete, cedar and glass, low and long, turned toward the water.

You come in on the middle level, and the lake arrives all at once. The great room runs the full width of the house with a wall of west-facing glass, a stone hearth, and a ceiling that opens two stories overhead. In the late afternoon the light comes in low and turns the whole room gold.

The kitchen shares that light. A twelve-foot marble island, a six-burner range, two dishwashers, and a coffee station stocked before you arrive. The dining table seats fourteen, and the doors behind it fold open onto the deck.

There are five bedrooms across three levels, and every one of them has a door that closes on a real room, not an alcove. The primary suite occupies the west end of the upper floor — a king bed facing the water, a soap-stone soaking tub, and a private balcony where you will end up drinking coffee at 6:30 in the morning even though you are on holiday. Two more king rooms and a queen room fill out the upper floor. On the lower level, a bunk room sleeps four under a low beamed ceiling, with its own bath and a hallway that muffles everything.

Outside, the property unfolds in terraces. A cedar hot tub sits screened by junipers. The firepit terrace steps down toward the bluff edge, and from there ninety-six cedar stairs switchback through the dune grass to the beach — 180 feet of it, private, with a lifeguard chair the previous owners built and we have never had the heart to remove.

What people tell us afterwards is not usually about the finishes. It is that they cooked every night. That the kids disappeared onto the beach for six hours. That somebody read an entire book. Grand Heights is a large house that somehow makes a group feel smaller and closer, and that is the whole point of it.