At Maison Gauthier, near Québec’s Mount Tremblant, life imitates art. The client’s interest in the work of minimalist painters influenced the floor plan and the interconnection of interior volumes.

In moving among them, one alternates between sensations of compression and expansion. The two wings of the house, one for the ceramics studio and three-car garage, the other for the living areas, are joined by a corridor seemingly filched from a Romanesque abbey, thanks to the claustrophobically low vaulted ceiling.

The materials palette, too, looks archaic, with its brick, oiled oak and chalky, lime-washed walls. The squeeze-play feeling of darkening and narrowing in the corridor gives way to an exhilarating feeling of openness when one reaches the expansive flanking rooms with their cathedral ceilings.

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