The Residences at Fireside

South Peak Resort occupies 360 acres at the base of Loon Mountain in Lincoln, New Hampshire, two hours north of Boston. The Residences at Fireside are forty-one modern-rustic townhomes built across two phases on the band of land between Crooked Mountain Road and Loon's Fox Run Trail. The promise is simple, and delivering it is the whole craft: step out the door, click into your bindings, and ski. True ski-in/ski-out.

Longfellow Design Build is the architect and builder for South Peak, and Fireside is where the firm's integrated model shows exactly what it is for. The trail came first, and the homes were designed to meet it.

On a mountain, the terrain decides more than the floor plan does. Fireside sits on grade, and every plan begins by working with the slope rather than flattening it. The townhomes step down the hillside across three levels, with lower levels that open onto the slope instead of burying themselves in it. The form follows the contour. The same step that creates a full walk-out level on the downhill side brings the uphill side even with Fox Run Trail, so a skier leaves the door and reaches the snow with no staircase in between.

The architecture is organized around the views the site offers. Homes face the Loon Valley to the west, where the light goes long at the end of a ski day, and frame direct sightlines onto Fox Run and the Timbertown Quad. Inside, the modern-rustic language is consistent: vaulted ceilings with stained natural-wood detail, floor-to-ceiling glazing in select residences, open stairwells that pull daylight down through loft spaces, and contemporary cable railings that keep the views open.

Buyers choose among three curated interior styles. In Phase 2 at Ember Court, the three floor plans are named for the topography itself: the Hillside, the Slopeside, and the Uphill, each describing where a home sits on the grade and how it meets the trail.

Building luxury homes on an active ski slope in the White Mountains comes down to getting a few fundamentals right. · How the structure sits on the grade. · How water and snowmelt move around it and away from it. · How the building meets a trail that stays skiable once the homes are finished and occupied.

Longfellow's structural engineers work in the same studio as its architects and builders. On a site like this, that is the whole point of the design-build model: the people drawing the home, standing it up on the hillside, and pricing it all work from one set of decisions, rather than negotiating them across three separate firms.

That integration shows up in details an owner feels rather than sees. Mudrooms are engineered as the working heart of a ski home, with dedicated, ventilated ski storage and heated floors that also run through the bathrooms, so gear dries and the cold stops at the door. Built-in audio and A/V are wired into the main living areas during framing rather than added after. The finished lower levels are conditioned living space, not the damp basements that mountain construction often settles for. Each of these is a structural and mechanical decision made early, when changing it is still cheap.

Fireside was delivered the way a community of this size should be, in two controlled phases. Phase 1, along Firelight Lane, went into foundations and framing in early 2025 and sold out, with occupancy beginning in 2026. Phase 2, Ember Court, sits just off Crooked Mountain Road and adds twenty-five townhomes and a single-family home, with construction now advancing.

The schedule is its own piece of engineering. The northern building season is short, and framing a community through a White Mountains winter, alongside an operating trail network, rewards the kind of sequencing that flatland projects rarely call for. Longfellow's answer was to deliver every home turnkey. Sub-Zero and Wolf appliances, custom cabinetry, modern glass fireplaces, finished garages, and paver patios sized to take a hot tub are all in place at handover, so an owner takes possession of a home that is genuinely complete.

What the work buys, in the end, is simplicity for the person who lives there. From a Fireside door, you ski onto Fox Run and reach the Timbertown Quad and the Lincoln Express Quad in roughly ten minutes, opening up all of Loon's terrain. The Nest, a semi-private homeowners' lodge at the base of the Lincoln Express Quad, and the future South Peak Village put gathering space, food, and amenities within a walk or a short run. A new gondola spanning the Pemi River will tie the resort to downtown Lincoln. The amenities keep arriving around homes that are already built and occupied.

The market has noticed. Boston Magazine named South Peak the Best Place to Own a Ski House in its 2025 New England Travel Awards, and the Fireside townhomes drew feature coverage in Modern Luxury Boston Common. None of that changes the discipline behind the project. The trail set the terms, and the design, the engineering, and the construction answered them as one piece of work.