This collection of buildings on the waters of Mader’s Cove is a summer residence and future full-time home for a husband and wife returning to their roots in the Maritimes. The residence also serves as a lively gathering place for their extended family.

The initial project mandate involved the adaptive reuse of an existing 19th century home and new construction of boathouse, garage and living areas while respectfully addressing the village street and creating a central recreational outdoor space that acts as the central focus of the project. Other requirements included ability for winter close down, efficient and creative storage solutions and interior spaces, finishes and lighting for the display of a sizeable art and sculpture collection. These four built elements: Living Pavilion, Historic Home, Garage and Boathouse are carefully sited with inspiration from the neighboring traditional barnyard building clusters. The resulting courtyard making grammar formally addresses the cove and the street while creating, and opening to, a terraced courtyard beyond.    

In Atlantic Canada we have a cool, labile climate, characterized by constant wet/dry, freeze/thaw cycles, resulting in a very high weathering rate for buildings. Over the centuries we have developed an elegant, economical light-weight wood building tradition in response to our challenging climate. The light timber frame has also become the dominant domestic construction system in North America. When continuously ‘outsulated’, the extensive use of platform framing and wood truss structural components in floors, walls and roof reduce amount of costly, energy intensive structural steel while creating a highly insulated building envelope. With its inherent high level of environmental sustainability, its affordability, and its subtle refined aesthetic, our practice builds upon and extends this often understated, everyday language of construction, through projects like the Mader’s Cove Residence.

Spatially, the four built elements that make up this project relate to each other and to the site in different ways. The ‘Historic Home’ is an 1880’s era gabled structure renovated to house guests, an office and a living space in keeping with its original ‘four square’ plan type and fenestration pattern. The ‘Boathouse’ is a monolithic shingled gable form referencing the ‘Historic Home’ across the street. This structure makes use of banal sliding barn doors to dramatically open the building to the water. The ‘Living Pavilion’ is an open plan, contemporary living, kitchen and dining pavilion with expansive views to the ocean and terraced courtyard. An efficiently designed service core shelters a master bedroom with an intimate view to the landscape. The ‘Garage’ is a simple mono-pitch structure set into the hillside dimensioned to house a 30 foot sailboat while keeping the standing seam metal roof precisely coplanar with the adjacent ‘Living Pavilion’.

Materially, this building combines highly crafted and precisely arranged maple panel millwork with neutral white painted drywall which acts as a backdrop for an extensive collection of painting, sculpture and rare geologic tokens. The exterior is palette consists of 2 materials: local eastern cedar shingles and a standing seam metal roof. It is a passive solar dwelling with a high thermal mass concrete floor, and hydronic in floor heating.