Shingled Canadian house blends forms into fluid composition
Canadian studios Oyama and Julia Manaćas Architecte have designed Waterhouse, a woodland house clad in wood shingles that blends into a natural clearing in Sutton, Quebec.
The 260-square-metre (2,800-square-foot) residence sits in a forest opening, surrounded by a pond, ferns, boulders, wildflowers and rolling hills that rise to the Green Mountains in the distance.
Oyama and Julia Manaças Architecte, which are both based in Montreal and collaborate as An architecture capsule, designed the multi-form house as a series of monuments that alternate between closed interiors and open spaces.
"The project is an uncanny yet delightful experience," the team said. "The clear sculptural form dissolves into a continuously morphing collection of bodies."
"The forms are an invitation to wander in, around and even on top of the house, leveraging all the site has to offer. "
The designers started with a unified mass, but separated out the program to respond to the site's various views. With softened and stretched edges, the singular house became three forms – the Atelier, the Great Room and the Tower.
"Through an iterative process using both physical and digital models, the relationship between the volumes is developed to achieve a more intimate scale and a finer, more porous interaction between objects and site," the studio said.
As people approach the site, the blind wall of the square Atelier section faces the road. A workshop and parking space sit in the pyramidal shape, with a storage mezzanine tucked into the steep slope of the roof.
The Great Room comprises most of the main floor and holds the essential living spaces. Rotated due south for optimal sun exposure, the rectangular block holds a combined kitchen, living and dining room that looks out through a wall of windows.
A thickened wall houses the fireplace, storage and ventilation system and separates the public space from the eastern primary suite, which opens to the landscape with a large deck space.
The western-most form on the site is the Tower, with three stories that each contain a guest suite. The ground floor of the Tower is partially submerged in the site and has a home office space.
The Tower's third floor contains a footbridge that passes over a green roof to the roof of the Great Room, where a terrace looks out at the surroundings.
"These three idiosyncratic volumes are unified in a single vernacular material of cedar shingles: strange bodies in familiar clothing," the studios said.
"The resulting negative space between them forms a kind of internal courtyard whose walls are clad in oak panelling, extending the wood cladding inside."
The central vestibule that connects the three volumes holds service spaces, including a laundry room and bathroom.
"The programmed transitional space organises movement in and out of each volume, rejecting a rigid, linear sequence for a more fluid and natural circulation," the team explained.
Other homes recently completed in Quebec include a linear stone house by LAMAS and a white, square residence and a discrete lakeside retreat, both by Naturehumaine.
The photography is by Alex Lesage.
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