Garden House

The clients, a professor of anthropology specializing in East Asian Archaeology, and a librarian/ researcher born in Kyoto, wished for a home that would: showcase their existing English Garden; conserve the site’s resources and evoke a spatial and cultural dialogue about the relationship between house and landscape. Most of all, they envisioned a home that would remain ‘timeless’ and rooted in the great traditions of northwest modernism.

For the past 15 years the owners have been transforming what started as a rugged two acre disturbed clear cut into an extensive collection of ornamental plants from around the world. Structures on site, built by the owners, include a ‘day cabin/ garden shed’ (built as temporary sleeping accommodations) and a tea pavilion. Both the garden and existing structures created a unique context in which the express the genus loci of place. The project site lays in a west facing bowl framed by a ridge of exposed granite to the north and forest to the south and east. The site offers a distant view of the snow capped mountains of Vancouver Island to the west. Due to the western exposure and bowl like topography the site can easily reach temperatures of 30 degrees on sunny days from early May through late September.

The clients’ programmatic requirements were humble, desiring a two bedroom house that included a home office and a layout suitable for entertaining both indoors and outdoors. In desiring to live a low impact lifestyle the clients choose to forgo a dishwasher (to conserve water and electricity) and requested that the floor area be kept to a modest 190 sm. Five ‘passive’ environmental control systems were chosen to reduce the home’s impact on the environment. In each system is an implicit aesthetic rationale to celebrate the site’s unique micro climate. At the rear of the site the house is earth sheltered to take advantage of the inherent insulating capabilities of the earth. A south facing ‘gallery space’ with floor to ceiling fenestration utilizes passive solar heating to capture winter solar radiation storing it in the concrete floor. Utilizing a passive cooling strategy for hot summer days called ‘night ventilation of thermal mass’, a 20.7m long by 3m high exposed interior concrete wall stores early evening cooling captured from the outdoors through an operable building envelope (consisting of three 1.82x2.44m bypass doors). The thermal mass of the concrete wall radiates the stored cooling back throughout the house during the day when the exterior envelope is left in the ‘closed position’. Rain water is harvested by a simple roof plan that drains to one point allowing water to be collected in 1.52 x 2.44m aquatic garden which can drain to holding tanks on the site. Natural daylight floods the rear of the house through a 18m long clerestory window.

To celebrate the owners’ love of gardening the architecture purposefully references historic aspects of landscape design. The L shaped layout and existing ‘day cabin’ creates an outdoor courtyard terrace that is raised above the existing garden by a 76.2cm high rustic stone wall hand constructed by the owners. This wall evokes ‘haha’ walls of the English Landscape Garden Style used to separate pastoral landscapes from agricultural lands beyond without visual interruption. The four degree shift in the foundation at the rear of the house creates a ‘forced perspective’, within the home’s two gallery spaces (an Italian technique used during the renaissance used to exaggerate a garden’s length). The small 60x60cm’ windows in the concrete wall frame small views of the granite ridge and rock garden beyond and are suggestive of Chinese walled gardens. The concrete stepping stones at the entry and wood frames that support the wooden roof structure suggest a Japanese approach to garden design by creating pause and repose as one travels into and through the home.

The choice of materials is intentionally simple, and includes steel, concrete, douglas fir, and birch. Colour is introduced in the architecture through subtle applications of stone found in the fireplace surround, kitchen countertops and ensuite wainscoting. All materials are rendered in their natural state and are assembled with a high level of detail to emphasize the skill and sophistication of the local craftsmen on Bowen Island.