A New Construction Estate Built for Indoor-Outdoor Living

When the homeowners set out to build their new home in the Waukee area, working with builder Destination Homes, they weren’t just planning a house. They wanted a full estate experience — a place where family life, entertaining and outdoor living could flow into one another without interruption. That vision meant glass everywhere it could reasonably go, doors that opened rooms straight onto the patio and a level of craftsmanship that would hold up to daily use in a home this large. 

To pull it off, the team turned to a mix of fiberglass casement and picture windows for everyday durability, wood windows for the home’s showcase glass moments and wood doors for the entries and sliders that lead outside. Every opening in the house, from the primary suite to the mudroom, was chosen with the same goal: let the architecture feel effortless while the products quietly do the work.

The great room is where the home’s outdoor-living ambitions are most obvious. Instead of a single picture window, the design stacks several rows of fixed glass on top of one another, floor to the upper level, so the backyard becomes part of the room rather than something viewed through it. 

One of those rows uses opaque spandrel glass instead of clear glass. It’s a small detail with a real purpose: it lets the window wall read as one continuous sheet of glass from the outside, even though it’s actually concealing the structural floor line between levels inside. The result is a great room that feels like it opens straight onto the pool and patio beyond, without a visible break in the glass to remind you otherwise.

The front of the home makes its first impression through a tall, gridded window feature that rises above the entry and continues up an interior stairwell. Built from a series of fixed wood windows joined together, it fills the entry and stairs with daylight from the moment you step through the front door. 

Around the home’s entries, Pella Reserve — Traditional inswing doors bring the same wood construction and black finish down to ground level, and they’re fitted with multipoint locking hardware — a practical choice for a home of this scale, where a single-point lock isn’t enough peace of mind for the homeowners.

Beyond the showcase moments, the bulk of the home’s windows are fiberglass — a mix of operable casement windows for ventilation and fixed picture windows for uninterrupted views, used across bedrooms, bathrooms, hallways, the office, the exercise room and the game room. Fiberglass was the right call for a house with this many openings: it holds its shape and its finish over time without the upkeep that a home this size would otherwise demand. 

Nearly every window in the house shares the same black exterior and interior finish, which keeps the architecture cohesive from room to room and matches the black-framed look of the great room’s window wall. Many of the casement windows are also fitted with InView screens, which keep the view as unobstructed as possible when the windows are open.

Connecting the indoors to the resort-style backyard meant more than windows. The game room and dinette each open through wide Pella Reserve — Contemporary sliding patio doors, and the primary bedroom has its own Pella Reserve — Contemporary slider leading outside — all finished in the same black as the rest of the home. 

Placed the way they are, these sliding patio doors turn three separate rooms into direct extensions of the pool, hot tub and fire pit areas outside, so entertaining doesn’t have to stop at the threshold.

From the street, the home reads as a single, considered composition — arched glass at the entry, a wall of windows over the great room and clean black lines carried across every opening in between. Inside, that same consistency means the house never feels like it’s stitched together from different rooms with different rules. It feels like one place, built around the way this family actually wants to live: connected to the outdoors, ready for a crowd and comfortable enough for ordinary days, too.