Mirror Point Cottage is a vacation home for a local fisherman’s daughter, her Dutch husband, who has a taste for minimalism, and their two young children, on a lake near Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia.

It is formally expressed as an elevated, extruded ‘fish shed’ 80 ft (24 m) long supported by a steel aedicule and a board-formed concrete entry core. Spatially, it is a south-facing screened porch elevated over the lake for prospect.  The thick north wall protects and insulates the interior from the public, north side.  The hovering building forms a gate that frames the view toward the lake on arrival to the site.  The rusted-steel aedicule contains a sunken outdoor summer kitchen, which offers a sheltered place at grade for the grandparents to watch the children playing on the beach.  The garage/guest house acts as a miniature version of the main house.

Materially this is a ‘sweet-and-sour’ building, combining the highly crafted cedar millwork with banal economical gang nail trusses, which are common in contemporary North American house construction.  The exterior is of local eastern cedar shingles and a standing-seam metal roof.  It is a passive solar dwelling, featuring a high-thermal-mass concrete floor and hydronic in-floor heating.