House on Limekiln Line

Huron County, ON, Canada

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House on Limekiln Line

Huron County, ON, Canada

Firm

Studio Moffitt

Type

Residential › Private House

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2011

SIZE

10,000 sqft - 25,000 sqft

The House on Limekiln Line is an 83 m2 house on a 25 acre farm lot in rural Canada. The house is off-grid and utilises a number of sustainable measures. To keep costs down, the designer moved to live near the site to oversee construction, and the house was built by local farmers and family members over three consecutive summers. The house has an intentionally modest footprint, but feels spatially expansive and offers rich views of the agricultural landscape in which it sits. Within the monolithic steel-clad shed lies a series of distinctively scaled spaces, each with calibrated views through to the seasonally shifting landscape beyond.

The 25-acre site is in constant flux due to seasonal shifts tied to weather, cultivation and occupation. The house sits lightly on the land while registering and amplifying specific conditions of this vast productive landscape. It frames expansive views of the shifting crop quilts adjacent to the house and acts as a datum to an existing topographic shift on the site. The house is calibrated to allow views into and through the house, which gives a sense of spatial expansion to the interior. The interior of the house is composed of a core floating within a shed shell. There are no conventional rooms or hallways; inhabitable spaces flow into one another, making the compact space feel expansive. An extended south deck and west deck walk offer threshold spaces that extend this experiential choreography while also mediating between enclosure and exposure and extending seasonal exterior occupation of the site.
The house is off-grid and a variety of sustainable measures reduce both operational and embodied energy. Siting and orientation facilitate passive heating and cooling to temper the vast seasonal temperature swings in Ontario. The generous south deck overhang blocks summer sun while allowing winter sun to heat the concrete thermal mass floor. Evenly distributed operable windows generate summer cross-ventilation and facilitate stack effect heat purging. Triple-glazed windows, a highly insulated envelope detailed to reduce thermal bridging, and high efficiency appliances ensure energy consumption is minimized.
The house offers back to the cultural landscape in which it sits. The architectural language of the exterior, a monolithic galvanized steel shed, is informed by the local agricultural vernacular. This ensures visual coherence within the landscape and means that the house could be built with locally available and sourced materials. Wood used for siding, decking, and interior counters, for example, was harvested from a forest within view of the house, and the galvanised steel came from a local company that specializes in roofing for barns and other agricultural buildings. The rich dialogue with local craftsman ensured that the house is rooted in the building practices and conventions of context while also offering the community exposure to innovative resource and energy-conserving construction practices.