Located on a lake in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montréal, the Maison des Ecorces is a year-round off-grid vacation house arrived at by boat in the summer and by car over ice in the winter.

The house is made from local materials, including trees from the site cleared during construction which become decorative interior features. The use of local lumber saves on transportation energy. Electrical power is provided by solar arrays and battery storage. The house is very highly insulated, keeping it warm in winter and cool in summer; it can be heated with two wood burning stoves comfortably with an exterior temperature of -40 degrees Celcius. The design allows for natural convection using cool breezes from the lakes and the natural “stack effect” of the open main stair to draw air through the house for natural cooling in summer. Solar angles were calculated to allow morning sun to penetrate to the innermost parts of the plan in the morning when temperatures can be chilly even in summer.

The house is approached from the wharf by a boardwalk that passes through wild lupin and ferns up to a guest house and cabana. From there, a sixty foot suspension bridge rises to a main house, which is built parallel with the
edge of the lake to the west.  Decks wrap around the house facing west to the lake, south over the guesthouse and east towards views of silver birch and forest.

The twelve foot high first floor living room enjoys views in all directions and breezes from the water. A grand maple staircase connects this great room with a second floor sitting room, providing a continuous vertical arrangement of spaces, and bringing shafts of morning sunlight directly into the center of the plan.

The design of the house combines two architectural traditions of the area. On the one hand is the English bungalow, a nineteenth century prototype of light wood-framed construction and deep overhanging porches, with low pitched roofs and a great sense of openness to nature. On the other hand is the Quebec manoir, a solid stone building with steep roofs, curved eaves, and small narrow dormers, based on Norman prototypes, rooted to the earth and generally confronting and protecting against nature.

In the Maison des Ecorces the opposites of tent-in-nature and farmhouse-fortress are combined. By doing so, the house joins the freedom of interior plan and fenestration possible with frame construction to the massive materiality of heavy wood materials visible in the three inch thick dove-tailed exterior planks and in the massive ceiling beams.

The trees that are used throughout the house are taken from the estate, and are symbolic of this marriage, at once an archetype of the rationality of wood framing and at the same time conveying the emotional impact of the solid and the sculptural.

By drawing on the deep roots of these traditions, archetypal experiences of shelter and light are made possible, creating a sense of time outside the everyday experience of life and work that is in a different key of being.