How, exactly, do you define luxury? You might be pretty confident you know what the word means; but when you get down to specifics, it’s actually a fairly elusive concept. To one person, it means the finest hotels, clothes, automobiles, jewellery, cuisine. But to another, it might simply be the security of a safe place to stay, a warm bed and clean sheets.
For the two elegant retreats here, luxury is being able to realize the dream of a home perfectly tailored to their owners’ own very specific needs. In the first case, it was blending the seemingly contradictory priorities of cloistered coziness with wide-open landscape views; of complete privacy but accommodating to frequent guests. In the other, it was a disarmingly simple design that used the principles of Feng Shui to not only harmonize perfectly with its surroundings, but with the priorities of its inhabitants as well.
A Den in Caledon
In the intriguing, bent-inwards design for a house near Caledon, Ont., the objective for Toronto-based Reflect Architecture was to create a serene, cozy home that celebrated the quiet beauty of its surroundings, while also being private for its owners, whether on their own or while welcoming friends up for the weekend.
As Reflect principal architect Trevor Wallace explains, the clients had been living in a downtown condo. He travels a lot for his work; she works at home. “They looked at each other one day and realized there was no reason to be living in a 900-sq.ft. box in the city; he just needed to be near an airport, and she could work anywhere,” says Wallace. “They loved the landscape of Caledon, so they decided to buy some land and build a house.”
Though the site they chose was set back a comfortable distance from the road, they wanted the design to balance maximum views of the landscape with an equally important need for coziness and privacy. The architects conceived a novel C-shape that, in effect, bends the home into three separate but conjoined volumes, creating a space that is a cloistered and private space for the owners, convivial for friends who regularly come to visit, and a wide-open celebration of the landscape outside, through floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall glazing that curves along the entire inside elevation.
On first approach along the driveway, you only see brief glimpses through the trees. But once you alight and enter through a sheltered stoop to the front door, the mood changes: it’s as if the house opens its arms wide, in a gesture to the landscape ahead.
Breaking the north-facing house into three slightly inwards-oriented sections was more than just a neat architectural trick: it orients each room for the best views and sun exposures at different times of day. The east-facing bedroom wing at one end is bathed in gentle morning sun, while the kitchen in the centre volume receives even light through the day and a panoramic view of woods and changing skies. The living room at the far end tilts to the northwest, perfect for enjoying a cocktail as the afternoon sun sinks below the trees.
The architects used material and form to play up the unusual footprint, and to blend the exterior with the unique colours and materials of its surroundings. For example, the kitchen island, clad in locally sourced granite, is shaped in a rhombus, following the angle of the C (as does the layment of the hardwood floorboards). Outer walls, where they aren’t glazed, are stucco painted in a shade of grey that blends softly with the landscape. Inside, the tracks and frames of the windows are recessed in the floor and ceiling so their edges effectively disappear, further blurring the line between indoors and out.
One of the small fascinations of the design is how it balances the wide-open reality of those big views with human-scale comfort. The living room furnishings are oriented towards the fireplace and TV across the room, so the view from the sofa is over your shoulder rather than straight ahead, which could easily become overwhelming. This way it’s there, but not in-your-face about it. And while the fan shape means the bedroom windows are visible to the rest of the house, the strategic location of bed and bath furniture allows for sufficient privacy.
At the end of the bedroom wing hallway, there’s a private hideaway for the owners, even when the house is full of guests: a tiny courtyard in the lee of a high wall, accessible only from the bedroom. It’s the perfect size for morning yoga, or a quiet place to decompress with a book.
“The design was a very careful balance between the intimacy of the house and the landscape outside,” says Wallace. “It’s very much ‘of the landscape,’ without going too far the other way and being overwhelmed by it.”
A Retreat in Mont Tremblant
Patrick Blanchette, a Québec architect who previously worked in real estate development, has often worked with clients from the Asian community and has developed a personal interest in the principles of Feng Shui. So, it seemed provident when two clients approached him to build a highly personalized home in the Mont Tremblant hills of Québec to be designed in harmony with Feng Shui principles.
Feng Shui, which literally translates as “wind/water,” is an ancient Chinese philosophy consisting of a series of design rules that, its proponents believe, optimize the flow of positive energy through a space. Feng Shui principles include a balance between opposing components; harmony with nature and the environment; the five basic elements of water, earth, wood, fire and metal; and the open and unfettered flow of air (and therefore, energy) through a space.
The secluded hillside that the clients chose for their new home presented an interesting challenge, in that it was tilted both laterally and top to bottom. From the driveway at the top lefthand corner, the house had to flow smoothly downhill in harmony with the slant of both planes. To achieve this interesting architectural feat, Blanchette and team conceived a single-storey structure divided into two semi-conjoined volumes, with the bedroom wing about half-a-storey below the rest of the house. (The owners also wanted a semi-private space for guests and short-term rentals, so a second-storey studio was placed on top of the house at its highest corner.)
Inside and out, materials were selected with the objective of complementing the landscape so synchronously that, over time, it would virtually disappear. The exterior is a disarmingly simple composition of concrete, glass, steel, and cedar strip, in a narrow palette of warm greys; it blends remarkably well with the rocks, sky, earth and trees that surround the house. As the cedar boards weather naturally to silver over time, the effect will be even more striking.
Inside, the design is guided by the same simple principles of flow and harmony with the environment. Concrete walls and floors – a material favoured by both architect and client – present a smooth uniform backdrop, against which the landscape and more tailored views play out through large windows.
Elsewhere, the yin-yang (or balance between opposites, another key Feng Shui principle) between indoors and out is even more deliberately blurred. Each of the home’s two main volumes is punctured by glassed-in mini courtyards (a third, slightly larger one occupies the space between the two volumes); each is planted with a single young tree that will one day grow to full size. The effect is to literally inject nature within the volume of the house.
One of the most dramatic events in the journey from concept to reality happened purely by accident. “One of the most important elements in Feng Shui is water,” explains Blanchette, adding that while the site had a beautiful view, it lacked any kind of natural water source such as a lake or river. But, as he relates, while the builders were blasting to create the level site that the house would sit on, suddenly a natural waterfall burst out of the ground, perfectly placed at the high side of the house-to-be. It would go on to become one of the central features of the landscaping.
“The architecture will change a lot,” Blanchette notes. “The cedar will turn grey; the trees will change; the landscape is like a textile. But it’s not just the beauty of the landscape all around the house. It’s the way that, over time, the house will disappear and become a natural part of it.”
Photography:
- A Den in Caledon: Doublespace Photography
- A Retreat in Mont Tremblant (46N74O Alt. 280): Welldone.archi
As featured in the March-April 2025 issue of Canadian Interiors magazine.
