The couple’s decision to purchase a second home on Deep Creek Lake was made while Svilar was working at Accenture, a management consulting firm in Arlington, Virginia, and the family felt comfortable with the extra expense. “So we started looking around, exploring if a property at the lake made sense,” he says.
Svilar and Cado initially planned to build their vacation retreat from scratch. In 2012, they purchased a 1-acre mountainside lot in the town of McHenry on the northernmost shore of the lake and began envisioning a custom home to suit their extended family. “We liked the idea of having some place to bring grandchildren…and make it a special experience for them,” Svilar says.
The couple then tapped William Kirwan of Muse Architects in Bethesda and Garrett County builder Jeff Gosnell of Oakland, Maryland, to design and construct a house terraced into a hillside.

But Cado and Svilar quickly abandoned the project when costs began to skyrocket due to the site excavations needed to anchor the structure. They started house shopping with a local real estate agent and narrowed their search to two properties for sale, a house built of logs and a more conventional home with siding and roof gables.
“I knew that Sue did not like log cabins, so I said, ‘OK, let’s buy the other house,’ ” Svilar recalls. “She surprised me when she said that she wanted to buy the log home.” The couple purchased the property for $910,000 in 2013 and sold the previously acquired lot five years later.
For Cado, the timber dwelling, built in 2005 on a mountain called Marsh Hill, presented the opportunity to create an alternative to her brick neocolonial residence in Silver Spring’s Ashton Preserve community. “I already had a traditional suburban home and wanted something very different,” Cado says. “I wanted the Deep Creek Lake house to be more rustic to fit with the area, and be more modern because there’s a simplicity to a modern aesthetic which I feel is more relaxing. I didn’t want clutter. I wanted the house to focus on the view.”
After living in the lake house part time for three years, the couple began an extensive 10-month renovation in 2016 to update the interior, which was as rustic as the home’s exterior. Exposed logs lined the walls and ceilings, and heavy timbers supported the staircase. “It was very dark and needed to be lightened up,” Cado says. “The original fireplace in the great room almost completely blocked the beautiful view of the lake.”
The homeowners again turned to Kirwan and Gosnell for the remodeling. “Bill [Kirwan] was detail-oriented and knew which aspects of the original house would work with our modern aesthetic and which needed to be changed,” Cado says. “Jeff [Gosnell] carried out those ideas and did quality work for us.”
Kirwan designed his parents’ vacation house at Deep Creek Lake in the mid-1990s and was familiar with the area and its mountain lodge aesthetic. He approached the log house remodeling with restraint, noting that “the best renovations are when you can make the biggest impact with the least number of changes.”
Major design modifications were few, but they made a huge difference in connecting the interiors to views of the wooded site and a bend in the lake. The fireplace was relocated from the lake-facing rear wall to one side of the two-story great room and rebuilt with fieldstone and a granite hearth. New folding glass doors installed across the back wall completely opened the room to the deck overlooking the water.
“I often sit with my morning coffee watching the sun come out through the glass. It can be a spectacular view,” Svilar says. “Then at night, it is a lot darker here than in D.C., so I have a telescope that I use to look at the moon and the planets.”

At the front of the house, the clunky timber staircase leading from the entrance hall to the two second-floor bedrooms was replaced with a lighter, more elegant flight of steel-framed stairs. Open risers and slender balusters connected by metal cables allow for unobstructed views from the front to the back of the main living area.
Outside, the original orange-colored timbers were stained a more unobtrusive dark brown to blend with the wooded surroundings. Timber railings and supports on the rear deck and front balconies were removed to make way for new steel balustrades. These streamlined industrial-style designs contrast with the home’s rustic charm and are more open to the views than the previous wooden railings.