This seven-bedroom recreational home sits on a residential street facing the ski hills in a development at the foot of the Alpine Ski Club in the Town of Blue Mountains near Collingwood, a major destination for skiers from Southern Ontario.
The house, by Peter Berton, Principal Emeritus in the Toronto office of +VG Architects – The Ventin Group Ltd., was designed for après-ski entertaining. It boasts open living spaces, a recreation room, sauna and a courtyard that, with its hot tub, fire pit, barbecue and heated floor, acts as an outdoor room. “The challenge was to create a recreational feel in a building in a suburban-style subdivision with house styles ranging from neoclassical to contemporary,” he says.
Despite its large size, he created a low, one-storey building at the front with two storeys at the back and courtyard in between. From the street, the chalet’s massing is smaller in scale and more pleasing to the eye than that of the adjacent, smaller, two-storey houses, which present a blunt vertical wall to pedestrians.
By making the courtyard the centrepiece of the design, the layout not only protects the hot tub and fire pit from prevailing winds but also provides a house that looks inward rather than to the street. The courtyard allows natural light to penetrate the living spaces while enhancing transparency between indoor and outdoor rooms. And the reduced height of the front elevation affords a view of the ski hill from the second-storey gallery overlooking the living room.
Interior materials include hardwood floors, natural stone, rift-sawn white oak, and Douglas fir for the post-and-beam cathedral ceilings. Exterior materials feature dark-stained natural wood siding, a metal standing-seam roof, aluminum-clad windows and natural stone.
The design takes everyday necessities into account, such as firewood arrayed in beautifully stacked rows to form an outdoor wall, elegant as a stone wall, as part of the entry sequence. Roller blinds tuck into pockets above the windows and ambient lighting is concealed in coves at the base of the rafters, eliminating visual clutter that would distract from views out.
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