Fontana’s Second-Home Problem
Here is a census fact that explains almost everything about siding in Fontana: in 2010, this village had 2,308 housing units and only 1,672 year-round residents. More houses than people. Fontana-on-Geneva Lake is a lake-house town at its core, even after the full-time population jumped 86.6% to 3,120 by the 2020 count.
Why does that matter for your exterior? Because a house nobody lives in from Labor Day to Memorial Day gets no early warnings. Nobody notices the caulk joint that opened in January. Nobody sees the paint blister in April. By the time you pull in for the summer, a small problem has had eight quiet months to become a wall repair.
I’ve spent 21 years fixing exactly that pattern. My crews have completed 7 projects in Fontana, 23 over in Lake Geneva, and 217 across Wisconsin, a lot of them for owners who live somewhere else most of the year. Innovative Windows and Siding is the Wisconsin division of Innovative Home Concepts, our registered name north of the border, and lake-house owners are a big share of why it exists.
My advice to every Fontana second-home owner is blunt. Stop buying siding you have to babysit. Buy siding that survives being ignored.
And this village deserves better than neglected exteriors. Fontana packs the Abbey Resort, the Lake Geneva Yacht Club, Big Foot Country Club, and some of the prettiest shoreline on Geneva Lake into 3.39 square miles. The cottages and lake houses here are the scenery. When your cedar peels for three summers straight, the whole street sees it, and so does every buyer who tours the block.
Fontana Siding Pricing
Every figure below is per square foot of wall area, installed by our own crew. Collect other Fontana bids and you will notice something: ours is the only one that came with published rates before you ever called.
| Material | Installed, Per Sq Ft of Wall | Where It Fits in Fontana |
|---|---|---|
| Builder-grade vinyl | $5.50 – $7.50 | Cottage rentals and quick refreshes off the water |
| Quality vinyl | $6 – $8 | Year-round homes in Indian Hills on a working budget |
| Insulated vinyl | $12 – $15 Mastic / $14 – $16 CraneBoard | Drafty mid-century cottages that get winter use |
| James Hardie / LP SmartSide | $16 – $20 | The lake-house standard: Abbey Springs, Country Club Estates, anything near the shore |
| Cedar | $16 – $22 | Purists restoring original lake-cottage wood, repaints and all |
| Versetta Stone | $25 – $30 | Entry surrounds and feature walls on premium rebuilds |
These are rates per square foot of wall area, not per square foot of floor plan, and your final number depends on measured wall footage, height, tearoff findings, and trim scope. We measure, then we quote, in that order. GreenSky financing available. Full siding cost guide →
A note on lake-house math. A $30,000 fiber cement job that needs nothing for 30 years beats a $17,000 repaint-dependent option that wants $12,000 of painting over the same period, and that is before you count the weekends you did not spend managing painters from 80 miles away. For an absentee owner, maintenance is not a line item. It is the whole decision.
Also worth naming: Fontana bids vary wildly because scopes vary wildly. One quote includes tearoff, sheathing repair, wrap, and matched trim; another quietly assumes an overlay and reuses 50-year-old flashing. Make every bidder itemize those four things in writing. The cheap number usually stops being cheap right there.
Materials for Lake Houses
Fontana sits on the west end of Geneva Lake, and everything below was picked for one job: looking right on a lake house while surviving Wisconsin winters unattended.
LP SmartSide →
Engineered wood strand, treated against moisture and fungal decay, tougher against impact than fiber cement. On a wooded Fontana lot where limbs come down in ice storms, that toughness is not theoretical. Prices in the same $16 to $20 band as Hardie, installs beautifully in cold weather, and we hold LP’s certification for it.
✓ LP SmartSide Certified
Insulated Vinyl
For the winterized cottages that host Thanksgiving and New Year’s, insulated vinyl adds foam-backed rigidity and measurable thermal help: $12 to $15 per square foot of wall for Mastic, $14 to $16 for CraneBoard. It is the best dollar-for-dollar upgrade on an older year-round Fontana home away from the shoreline. On the water itself, I still push you up a tier.
Cedar, With Eyes Open
We install real cedar at $16 to $22 for owners who want authentic wood and accept the repaint cycle that comes with it. On an unoccupied lake house, though, cedar is the highest-maintenance choice on this page. The photos on this page show what 40 unwatched years did to one cedar home, and what we replaced it with.
What Kills Cottage Siding
Geneva Lake is a 5,401-acre glacial kettle, 135 feet deep, and it never stops making weather for the homes around it. Humidity all season. Fog that sits on the west end. Then Walworth County winter arrives, and Wisconsin’s energy-code maps classify this county a full zone colder than the Illinois counties just south. Zone 6 against Zone 5.
Neglect is an accelerant. An occupied house gets small repairs when small problems appear. A Fontana lake house gets discovered problems. That gap is why identical materials age faster on second homes, and why my spec for absentee owners is always the material that needs the least from you: fiber cement or treated engineered wood, factory-finished, properly flashed.
The lake look cuts both ways. Fontana’s charm is wood texture: shakes, shingles, board siding on cottages that date back generations. Keeping that look in actual wood means recommitting to paint every 5 to 8 years. Keeping it in HardieShingle or LP means the texture stays and the recommitment ends. I have installed both, and I have zero regret steering lake clients to the second option.
Ice works from the top down. Winter also attacks Fontana walls from above. When snowmelt refreezes at the roof edge, water backs up, finds the wall cavity, and runs down behind the siding where nobody sees it until spring. On every re-side we inspect the kick-out flashing and the gutter line as part of the job, because new siding over a bad water path is just an expensive bandage. If your gutters overflow in a January thaw, tell us during the estimate. It changes the spec.
Resale watches your walls. Fontana property trades at lake-town values, and buyers walk the exterior before they ever open the front door. Fresh, certified fiber cement photographs like new construction. Twenty-year-old chalked vinyl photographs like a to-do list. Which listing do you want to be?
How We Run Your Job
Most exterior contractors run their process around their own schedule. Ours is built around a simple Fontana reality: the owner might be 80 miles away for eight months of the year, and the project has to run flawlessly anyway. Five steps, every one of them documented.
Inspection, Your Schedule
We meet at the lake house on a weekend you are already up, or we inspect while you are away and review everything by phone with photos. Either way you get measured wall area, moisture readings at the trouble spots, and straight answers about what can wait.
One Written Number
Itemized quote built from the measurement: product, finish, trim scope, tearoff, disposal. If sheathing repair looks likely, it is priced as a contingency up front instead of appearing as a surprise invoice later. GreenSky financing terms come in writing if you want them.
Materials on Order
Color-matched James Hardie typically carries a 4 to 6 week lead time; LP and vinyl often move faster. We schedule the crew against real delivery dates, so the project starts when materials exist, not when a salesperson hoped they would.
Install, Documented Daily
A Hardie or LP re-side runs 5 to 10 working days. You get progress photos as we go, including everything we uncover behind the old cladding, so an owner in Chicago sees the same job the crew sees. No exposed walls overnight, ever.
Walkthrough, Even Remote
Final walkthrough happens in person or by video call, your choice. Warranty registration, our 2-year workmanship coverage, and the full photo record land in your inbox. The yard gets magnet-swept and the dumpster disappears before your next drive up.
Your Lake House, Handled
Send us a few photos of your Fontana exterior and we’ll tell you honestly whether it needs work now, next year, or not at all. Estimates are free, and remote owners get the full photo-documented process. Plenty of the inspections we run end with us telling the owner to wait. That honesty costs us jobs this season and wins us the right ones for the next decade.
James Hardie Select Contractor • LP SmartSide Certified • A+ BBB since 2005
The Case for IHC
Manufacturer-Audited Work
James Hardie’s Select Contractor program and LP’s SmartSide certification are not stickers; they are standing obligations to install to the manufacturer’s spec, with our work subject to their review. Around Geneva Lake, certified fiber cement installers are scarce. That scarcity is exactly why so much local siding underperforms its warranty.
A Track Record You Can Count
402 Google reviews, 4.6-star average, A+ BBB, 21 years under the same family ownership. And on this side of the state line: 217 completed Wisconsin projects, including 7 right here in Fontana. We are not testing a new market on your house.
Built for Absentee Owners
Daily photo documentation, decisions by phone, video walkthroughs, and a crew chief who calls before changing anything. Most contractors tolerate remote owners. We planned our whole process around them, because this is a village where housing units outnumbered year-round residents in the 2010 census, and the work cannot wait for the owner to be standing in the driveway.
No Storm-Sales Theater
You will not get a knock on your Fontana door after a hailstorm from us, because door-to-door storm selling is not our business. We do planned, retail exterior remodeling for people who chose to invest in their house. Different customer, different craft, different company.
Close Enough to Show Up
Our Crystal Lake showroom at 4410 IL-176 is roughly 25 miles from the west end of Geneva Lake. That is close enough for a service call, a warranty visit, or a Saturday showroom trip to handle full-size samples before you commit a lake house to a color.
Crews We Hand-Pick
The installers on your cottage are hand-picked specialist crews working for a women-led family company: vetted, factory-trained on the products they fasten, and many with IHC for 15 years or more. The crew that answers to us is the crew that answers to you.
Around the Village
Fontana packs a lot of different housing into 3.39 square miles. What I recommend depends heavily on which pocket you are in.
A useful pattern to know: much of Fontana’s neighborhood fabric arrived in waves. The lakefront cottages came first, generations ago. Then the early-1970s development push built Abbey Springs and Abbey Hill almost together, while additions like Indian Hills established the year-round village. Houses built in the same wave age in the same wave, which is why whole streets here seem to need exteriors at the same time. If your neighbors are re-siding, your walls are probably on the same clock.
Abbey Springs
The gated golf community on the west end, developed in the early 1970s, which means original and second-generation exteriors are aging out together. HOA-conscious color palettes, wooded lots, and lake exposure make this prime Hardie and LP territory. We handle the architectural-approval paperwork with you before anything is ordered.
Abbey Hill
Condominiums and single-family homes from the same early-1970s development wave as Abbey Springs. Fifty-year-old buildings mean tired substrates: we probe sheathing carefully here and price contingencies honestly. Association projects get phased scheduling so the whole hillside is not wrapped in scaffolding at once.
Indian Hills
One of the additions that built the new, year-round Fontana. Occupied homes, working budgets, winter heating bills. This is where insulated vinyl and LP SmartSide earn their keep: real thermal and durability gains at a number a full-time household can plan around.
Country Club Estates
Between Williams Bay and Beloit Road, near the Abbey Springs course. Larger homes, longer wall runs, and owners who usually want the upgraded look: HardieShingle accents, mixed-profile elevations, stone touches at the entry. Bigger canvases reward better design, and we sweat those elevations drawing by drawing.
The Lakefront and Shore Path
Fontana’s shoreline carries the Shore Path tradition, with the public walking easement running right past the front lawns. Your siding here is on permanent public display, and it takes the lake’s full moisture load. Factory-finished fiber cement, detailed flashing, and zero shortcuts. This is the most demanding siding assignment in the village.
Village Core and Fontana Beach
The blocks behind the beach and the Abbey Resort, the harbor landmark that opened in 1963, mix old cottages, newer infill, and rental duplexes. Projects here range from a $14,000 vinyl refresh on a rental to full cedar-to-Hardie conversions. The common thread is foot traffic: in a resort village, your exterior is part of the streetscape whether you like it or not.
A Cedar Rescue Story
These three photos follow a single real project: a 40-year-old cedar exterior our crew tore off and rebuilt in James Hardie on a lake-area home in Lake Zurich, IL. This is the exact playbook we bring to Fontana cottages.
That is what buy-once siding looks like on a lake-country house. Want the same for yours? Book a free Fontana siding estimate.
Fontana Siding FAQs
How much does new siding cost in Fontana, WI?
Siding in Fontana runs from $5.50 per square foot of wall area for builder-grade vinyl up to $25 to $30 for Versetta Stone accents, all installed. The lake-house sweet spot is James Hardie or LP SmartSide at $16 to $20 per square foot of wall. A cottage with 1,600 square feet of wall area prices between $22,400 and $28,800 in that tier; a larger Country Club Estates home with 2,800 square feet of wall runs $39,200 to $50,400. Totals always come from measured wall area, never from guesses, and GreenSky financing is available.
What siding is best for a Geneva Lake vacation home?
For a house that sits empty most of the year, James Hardie fiber cement is the best answer, with LP SmartSide close behind. Both survive Zone 6 freeze-thaw and lake humidity without anyone watching them, and factory finishes eliminate the repaint cycle entirely. Wood cedar looks wonderful and demands the most attention of any material, which is exactly the wrong pairing for an absentee owner. If you love the cedar look, HardieShingle siding gives you the texture with none of the babysitting.
Can you replace cedar siding with James Hardie on a cottage?
Yes, and cedar-to-Hardie conversions are some of our signature work. We strip the wood to the sheathing, repair what four decades hid, install a full weather barrier, and rebuild in HardiePlank, HardiePanel, or HardieShingle profiles that keep the cottage’s original character. The Lake Zurich project pictured on this page is exactly that job. Budget $16 to $20 per square foot of wall area, plus honest contingency pricing for any rot we find underneath. The mixed-profile approach matters on cottages: plank on the main walls, panel in the peaks, shingle texture where the original shakes lived, so the finished house reads as restored rather than replaced.
Can you do the whole siding project while I’m away for the season?
Yes. Most of our Fontana work happens without the owner on site. You get the measured quote by phone and email, daily progress photos during the 5 to 10 install days, immediate photo documentation of anything we find behind the old siding, and a video walkthrough at the end if you cannot make the drive. Payment, warranty registration, and the complete photo record all handle remotely. The house is buttoned up and the yard magnet-swept before you see it in person.
When is the best time of year to reside a Fontana lake house?
Off-season, honestly. Fiber cement and LP SmartSide install properly in cold months, and an October-through-April project means the scaffolding is gone before your first summer weekend. Hardie’s 4 to 6 week material lead time plus 5 to 10 install days sets the planning window: call in late summer for a fall slot, or midwinter for a spring finish. Vinyl is the exception; it wants warmer temperatures, so we schedule it accordingly. There is a booking advantage too: off-season calendars are simply easier to reserve, so a January phone call gets you a better slot than a June one. Summer-only owners who want to watch the work should plan a September start instead.
Who is Innovative Windows and Siding?
Innovative Windows and Siding is the registered Wisconsin division of Innovative Home Concepts, the family-owned exterior company that has operated from Crystal Lake, Illinois since 2005. Same owners, same certified crews, same (815) 356-9020 phone number, with 402 Google reviews at 4.6 stars and an A+ BBB rating behind the name. We created the Wisconsin division because Geneva Lake area homeowners kept hiring us north across the line: 217 Wisconsin projects so far, including 7 in Fontana and 23 in Lake Geneva.
Dig Deeper
Sources and standards: James Hardie product documentation; LP SmartSide specifications; Village of Fontana history archive.
Free Fontana Siding Estimates
Whether it’s a Shore Path cottage wearing 40-year-old cedar, an Abbey Springs home due for its second exterior, or an Indian Hills house fighting winter heating bills, start with a measured, written number from a certified crew. Remote owners welcome. Same-day response.
Free estimates • GreenSky financing available • James Hardie Select Contractor • Serving Fontana-on-Geneva Lake and the west end
Innovative Home Concepts
4410 IL-176, Ste 1
Crystal Lake, IL 60014
(Serving Fontana, Walworth County, WI)
Phone: (815) 356-9020
Text: (815) 356-9020
Email: info@innovativehomeconcepts.com
Monday–Friday: 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM
James Hardie Select Contractor
LP SmartSide Certified
A+ BBB Rating • 402 Google Reviews, 4.6★
Women-Led, Family-Owned Since 2005
