This $15 Million Lake House Is Bringing Tahoe-Style Luxury to Big Bear, California
Bedrooms: 7 Bathrooms: 7 full + 2 powder rooms Interior: 7,167 ft² / 666 m²
Lot: 1.63 acres / 0.66 ha Lakefront: 100 ft / 30.5 m
Amenities: Chef’s kitchen with 2 islands and wood-fired pizza oven, 2 primary suites with private terraces and fireplaces, cedar sauna, recreation room, covered outdoor dining, firepit, wood-clad spa, custom dock option, heated driveway, whole-home audio, smart-home systems, solar, 2 garages including a climate-controlled garage/workshop for boats and recreational vehicles, landscaped gated grounds, and panoramic lake and mountain views.
Listed with Dani Rosenthal of Vista Sotheby’s International Realty and Neyshia Go of Sotheby’s International Realty for $15 million, Waterview is a newly completed lakefront estate in Big Bear Lake, California, designed by Beau Laughlin and Lindsey Gort of Framework Design + Build.
Big Bear has never really competed with Tahoe on architecture. This $15 million new lake house is betting that it can.
Big Bear Lake is only about 100 miles from Los Angeles, compared with roughly 440 miles to Lake Tahoe. For someone based in LA, that makes Big Bear a realistic weekend escape. Tahoe is a proper trip. Big Bear still offers skiing, lake life, forests and a four-season mountain setting without leaving Southern California.
Designed by husband-and-wife duo Beau Laughlin and Lindsey Gort of Framework Design + Build, this $15 million Big Bear lake house pairs pale oak, natural stone and refined mountain interiors with the scale and finish more often associated with Lake Tahoe’s upper-end lakefront market.
That proximity has mattered for more than a century. Films were already being shot in the San Bernardino Mountains by the 1910s, and Big Bear became a regular backdrop for Hollywood productions during the industry’s early decades and Golden Age.
Waterview is Laughlin and Gort’s first ground-up project in Big Bear, developed through Framework in collaboration with exterior architects The Ranch Mine and landscape studio ORCA Design.
Before turning to residential development, Laughlin spent more than a decade designing, building, owning and operating restaurants and bars in Los Angeles, earning industry awards along the way. He also built two of the city's Michelin-starred restaurants: Providence and N/Naka. That hospitality background shows up throughout Waterview.
“Big Bear has this incredible landscape that nobody's really built for yet,” Laughlin said. “We saw an opportunity to bring the level of craft and design you'd expect in Aspen or Tahoe to a lake that's still relatively undiscovered.”
The house keeps some familiar mountain elements, including a standing-seam roof, exposed beams and large dry-stacked stone fireplaces. Inside, the heavier cabin look is replaced by white oak across the walls, ceilings, cabinetry and staircases, large expanses of glass and a warmer palette of stone and natural finishes.
Its location, about 100 miles from Los Angeles, gives Big Bear a much closer alternative to Tahoe’s established mountain-lake luxury market.
The interiors stay warm rather than rustic, with bone, walnut, camel and terracotta tones, museum-quality stone throughout the bathrooms, and lake views pulled into nearly every room.
The kitchen has 2 large islands, Ceppo Rosa stone counters and a brass-front wood-fired pizza oven, reflecting Laughlin’s hospitality background and the emphasis on entertaining.
The site has its own history. A mining-era cabin once stood on the property and later appeared as Dr. Stephen Falken’s home in the 1983 film WarGames. The cabin had already been removed before Waterview was built, though an original water pump remained and was later donated by Laughlin and Gort to the local historical museum.
The 1.63-acre parcel could reportedly have accommodated six homes. Instead, they chose not to subdivide it, using the full lakefront site for a single estate and preserving a level of acreage, frontage and privacy that is unusual for Big Bear.
Set on 1.63 acres with 100 feet of lake frontage, the newly completed home has 7 bedrooms and 7,167 square feet of interiors.
At $15 million, Waterview is an outlier locally, but not for the kind of house it is trying to be. Comparable-scale estates in Tahoe’s established luxury enclaves routinely trade well into eight figures. This is the kind of house that would not look unusual in Tahoe’s upper-end lakefront market, but is being introduced into Big Bear at a price that is extraordinary for the area and relatively modest by top-tier Tahoe standards.
According to the listing agents, Big Bear’s upper end has already moved from around $4.2 million to more than $8 million in recent years, while much of the existing high-end inventory remains traditional cabin or lodge-style housing.
Big Bear already has the lake, the mountains, skiing and one major advantage over Tahoe: Los Angeles is only about 100 miles away. Waterview is testing what happens when the housing starts to catch up with the setting.
Just about 100 miles from Los Angeles, Big Bear has been tied to Hollywood for more than a century, serving as both a mountain escape and a filming location since the 1910s.
Photography by Nils Timm. See more on Neyshia Go of Sotheby’s International Realty.
