WASAGATHOM

ON, Canada

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WASAGATHOM

ON, Canada

Firm

AGATHOM Co. Ltd

Type

Residential › Private House

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2019

SIZE

1000 sqft - 3000 sqft

BUDGET

$1M - 5M

Photos

Steven Evans Photography (20), Steven Evans (6), Pascal Arseneau (4)

WASAGATHOM
A contemporary answer to a Usonian plan

Tethered to a compact footprint, this family home is imbued with connectivity to its site and a sense of open yet private ever-expansive spaciousness to its interiors.

The WASAGATHOM House, is situated just off the sandy white shores of Wasaga Beach at the southern edge of Georgian Bay, Ontario. Nestled within a band of towering native spruce and birch trees, the home reaches into and connects with its landscape creating a modest yet highly functional space within its compact footprint.

The clients sought a refuge from their busy urban lives and a place to later retire in. The design holds their passions for entertaining, Canadian art, and gardening. In their new home, they sought a contemporary take on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Houses. They wanted a fresh counterpoint to the everywhere suburbia tract homes that are so dominant.

The L-shaped house is designed with clarity of form and economy. Its two-intersecting mono-pitched roofs provide a drama of rising slopes. Upon arrival, the form presents a sculpted façade, with an interplay of solids and voids. A softly rising ramp leads to the greeting porch, with carefully carved openings that frame tree views. Openings take on monumental height at the very peak of the roofline, creating dramatic yet “hyggelig”/intimate spaces for welcoming and reflection. This transitional indoor/outdoor porch space provides layers of privacy as arrival moments in a curated procession, while offering seasonal light, breeze, sounds and smells to enter the home.

At the lowest edge of the roof sits a generous carport, allowing views and a pathway to the rear of the property. Here the L-shaped home creates an inner protected courtyard defined equally by the built form and its tree-lined landscape. The courtyard provides outdoor living spaces that extend the use into the temperate months. A spacious, slightly raised peninsular patio gives the setting for dining and relaxation. Deeper in the garden resting on the white sand is an open fireplace for gathering, which is also repeatedly enjoyed by views from inside.

Within the home, the rooms are organized into its two distinct wings. In the taller sloped volume are the open-plan main living spaces. The main wing is raised as a platform from that of the garden and the private lower wing – providing elevated views deep into the landscape and thresholds through level shifts. Living spaces are punctuated by unadorned concrete block walls, nestling oak millwork, and holding a generous Rumford fireplace, perfect for a cozy winter evening.
Across the dining table, a wooden ramp descends gently along the back of a custom-built bench, creating a and plinth edge to view the back gardens through large windows. The looped circulation and the home’s interior and exterior sloping ramps create a playful and fully accessible home.

The tactile elements of the fragmented concrete walls, sunken wood ramps and sculptural wood built-ins define spatial separations and allow openings throughout to encourage expansive sight lines and dialogue. This interconnectedness is further enhanced through volumetric shifts within the sloping ceilings, subtle elevation changes, ample views and multiple access points to the gardens.

A high sky-gazing window at the kitchen- straddling the intersection of the two main roofs celebrate the glow of the setting sun and guides to the private “glass hall” beyond. A single-loaded corridor leads to the bedrooms ending in an intimate library. The bedrooms open wide to the glass hall, and the hall again to the inner gardens giving welcoming views and breezes to its quiet wing. A cedar trellis travels from interior to exterior calculated to balance sunlight with shade while allowing the low winter sun to warm the polished concrete floor.

“I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day’s work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.” Frank Lloyd Wright - a founding idea for Biophilic design.

The clients aspired to capture the local natural environment within its site as well as its interiors. Materials sought for them are sustainable, locally sourced, natural, highly sensory, robust, and are patina rich choices. Locally harvested and milled rough-sawn Ontario cedar boards were prepared as the building’s skin – designed in a pattern to create a musical rhythm of 5 bars of high relief in its vertical siding, mirroring the verticality of the surrounding tree line.

Throughout the landscaping, cleft local limestone is set within the arrival ramp in pathways in the gardens, marked by Ontario field granite boulders. Within the inner sleeve walls of the welcoming porch a smooth wide-plank cedar board is used. Over time the porch will gracefully patina to a golden red-wine hue while the exterior exposed walls continue to silver as like its neighbouring Ontario barns.

The careful sculptural arrangement of spaces and materials reveals a tranquil sensibility of belonging and a wonderful place to simply be.

Within the interior of the home cedar reappears on the finely crafted interlocked wooden dropped ceilings, held up by cedar cabinets of the same hand. Native flat cut white oak is found in the millwork throughout the interior. The polished concrete radiant floors have local pebbles in their mix giving memories of walks at the water’s shore.
Sustainable future-proofing construction methods were of importance to the us and our client. The sloping roofs are engineered for future installation of photovoltaic panels. The exterior walls and roofs have been thickened to serve as a passive insulator. Strategically placed operable high-performance triple-glazed windows, with low-E coatings, maximize passive cooling and provide natural cross ventilation. Slab-on-grade floors include highly efficient radiant in-floor heating. All methods contributed to facilitate the use of a minimal heating system. LED light fixtures and zoned efficient high-velocity cooling system reduce electricity demand. Robust and zone appropriate landscaping minimize rainwater run-off and encourage growth.

Images Steven Evans Photography

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ON, Canada

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WASAGATHOM

ON, Canada

Other Projects by AGATHOM Co. Ltd

Cogs

Still Point

Dove

Rainforest Retreat

WASAGATHOM

ON, Canada

Product Spec Sheet

Collaborating Firms

Team