Escarpment House is a multigenerational retreat for a couple, their adult children, and grandchildren, located on a 20-hectare site within a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve. It rises up from and rests gently atop the Niagara Escarpment, a ridge of dolomitic limestone circling the western end of Lake Ontario and sweeping northwest to Georgian Bay. Depleted by a century of agricultural use, the terrain is reverting to native species partially through the efforts of landowners including a—A’s client. Embracing this natural richness, the house merges into the crest of the landscape and sits below the brow of a dramatic 30% slope overlooking a spring-fed pond. Set in a planar arrangement of terraces and retaining walls and clad in local Algonquin limestone with fully glazed walls that blur interior and exterior space, Escarpment House makes a statement about the relationship of building to context. With a precise palette of stone, glass and metal, the design revisits the modernist tradition of material minimalism in a nod to Arthur Erickson’s advocacy for a “simple and geometrically concise” relationship of architecture to landscape.
The 560 m2 home is programmed with multiple interior and exterior family gathering spaces, private bedrooms and en suites. The house is flanked by terrace beds of native species in corten steel that extend down the slope, framing the architectural intervention while ‘calling out’ to the surrounding fields of native grasses, shrubs, and trees. The garage, mechanical rooms and amenity space are tucked away within the hillside. The geometry of house-related plantings disappears in a grove of new and existing trees on the hill above the house. The grove also conceals a deep, 250-meter long gravel-filled trench that directs stormwater away from the house and down the slope. A pond house is located 100m downslope, adjacent to the spring-fed pond. The 60m x 13 x 300mm roof slab comprises 36 tonnes of concrete reinforced by 27 tonnes of steel, supported on limestone-faced structural walls resting on a floor slab emerging from the slope. Escarpment House reaches out into the landscape and, by giving equal regard to both the natural and built environment, brings the two closer together.
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