Case study · Deep Creek Lake, MD
Woodland Chalet:
the house that answers back.
The first Lakehearth build — live in production since April 2026 at a luxury rental you can book today.
The property
A serious house
with serious amenities.
Woodland Chalet is a multi-level mountain chalet in the woods near Deep Creek Lake: a great room with vaulted ceilings, a private theater, a 17-by-45-foot game room, a pool house with its own pool, two outdoor hot tubs, and decks that run the length of the house.
For guests, that's paradise. For an owner, it's dozens of systems — locks, four climate zones, four audio zones, pool equipment, cameras, sensors — that all have to work for strangers, unsupervised, every weekend.
The problem
Luxury hardware,
binder-and-lockbox software.
The property had premium smart hardware — August locks, Honeywell thermostats, Hot Spring tubs, whole-house WiiM audio — but guests experienced none of it. Instructions lived in a binder. Questions went to the owner's phone. Every arrival meant manually issuing codes; every checkout meant hoping they were changed.
Template guidebook apps couldn't touch the actual hardware, and consumer smart-home apps would have handed guests the owner's entire system — cameras, pool equipment, utility data and all. The property needed software that didn't exist: guest-facing control with owner-grade security.
The build
What we engineered.
Guest experience
An installable web app guests reach from a text message — no app store. Personalized arrival, a live dashboard of the house, controls for locks, garage, climate, hot tubs, pool temperature, and four-zone audio, plus a digital guestbook and guided checkout.
AI concierge, twice over
One concierge brain, two interfaces: text chat and natural, real-time voice. It answers house and local questions from a curated knowledge base, operates every approved device, runs scenes, and files maintenance reports to the owner.
Security broker
Guests never touch the smart-home system directly. A hardened intermediary enforces a device allow-list, risk-scores every action, requires PIN step-up for locks and garage, clamps every setpoint server-side, and logs everything.
Zero-touch operations
Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com calendars provision each stay automatically — private link, door codes, expiry at checkout. The owner gets an admin dashboard, push notifications, audit logs, and automated backups.
For the technically curious
The stack, plainly.
Where it stands
Running. Growing.
Booked.
Lakehearth has operated Woodland Chalet's guest experience since April 2026 — every stay provisioned automatically, every device action logged, every guest greeted by name. The platform keeps growing: the AI song studio, the guest logbook, and the voice concierge all shipped after launch, to a live house.
It's not a portfolio piece we retired after the screenshots. You can book the house and use it this weekend —almostheavenescapes.com.
