Clear Lake Cottage

CLEAR LAKE COTTAGE Seguin Township / Ontario / Canada

CLEAR LAKE COTTAGE

A Toronto family of five required a new fourseason cottage to replace their existing 1950’s structure. The goal was to blend with the rural character of the quiet lake community and provide a clean modern environment that engages the landscape and captures a ‘cottage’ feel. The site is located on Clear Lake in Seguin Township, Ontario with a large lake frontage. The building sits quietly behind trees, away from the water with its orientation predominately to the east, collecting warmth and direct morning light.

The lot features dense woods to the west, and lake frontage to the east. The site’s orientation is predominately east, collecting warmth and light in the morning. The building sits low on the land and steps along its length to connect with the landscape. The building sits quietly behind trees away from the water for privacy and engagement with the forest.

12 UPPER FLOOR PLAN

2

1

3

2

4

5

6

9 7

1

10 11

8

0

GROUND FLOOR PLAN 1 Arrival

7 Master Suite

2 Bedroom

8 Morning Terrace

3 WC

9 Kitchen / Dining / Living

4 Stairs

10 Screened Porch

5 Paul’s Room

11 Day Terrace

6 Utility / Mud Room

12 Upper Loft

1

2M

Conceived as the ‘Campsite’ (tents around a campsite), three primary volumes: living space, bedrooms, and master suite, are registered on the site to maximize views of the forest and lake, creating separation between program and privacy on site. The volumes were arranged to frame exterior spaces and capture an ambiguous indoor/outdoor conditions in-between. A peaked sloped roof was used to achieve an ambiguously modern vernacular feel, resulting in a formal expression of the archetypical ‘house’. Inside, ‘the Big-top’ single tent pole was used to support a giant hip roof housed the volumes below. The roof and walls merge in a singular streamline form that captures within it outdoor spaces creating a spatial continuum inside and out.

The building massing is carved away to expose the interior Douglas Fir roof and wall structure, capturing pockets of outdoor spaces and creating a spatial continuum – a porosity of inside to out. Taking cues from the client’s fondness for Scandinavian fishing shacks, with their pine tar-painted cedar, the building is clad in black corrugated metal – a cost effective

North American interpretation of this shoreline aesthetic. The result is decidedly modern, but raw and industrial too. This approach to a ‘high and low’ material palette and divergent typologies is a strategy to disarm the precious nature of ‘designed’ space.

The interior is detailed with smooth, warm Douglas Fir plywood to contrast the textured exterior black cladding. Exposed areas of plywood framing are either open to above (morning terrace) or clad with smoke tinted corrugated acrylic (arrival spaces). The rooms facing the forest support an open mezzanine space, used as bedrooms. This mezzanine is emphasized with a stained oak ‘Black Box’ treatment and is an extension of the materiality of the exterior – signifying enclosure. The screened porch has a bi-folding partition opening to the cottage interior. 50% of the glazed envelope can be left in the ‘open’ screened position allowing for the cottage to be exposed to breeze, fragrances, acoustics, and shadow play – capturing the natural feel of the site.

MJMA (MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects) Copyright Š 2017 by MJMA All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission from the publisher is strictly prohibited.

For more information about this project, please contact: Amanda Chong T: 416-593-6796 ext 245 E: achong@mjma.ca www.mjma.ca