Along the shore of Lake Huron, a private retreat blends with nature in both its sustainable practices and its design motif. There are many things that caught the judges’ eyes and why they named it the Natural Metals category winner in the Metal Architecture Design Awards. “There’s a very humble restraint,” says judge Lee Calisti, AIA, principal of Lee CALISTI architecture+design, Greensburg, Pa. “The purpose, the place. This isn’t somebody trying to show everything they can do. They just had real simple forms that are elevated. They had one detail for the eave and the corner and they just ran with it.”
A Canadian retreat uses simple forms and repetition
Judge Rand Elliott, FAIA, president of Rand Elliott Architects, Oklahoma City, agrees. “The lines on the chimney come right down to meet the roof. Somebody’s really thinking about it. The knife edge at the gutter line is beautifully done. It’s one idea, one material. Its sense of context is the color that looks like the bark of the trees.”
Speaking of the materiality, judge Mark Roddy, FAIA, principal of Mark Roddy Architects, Sacramento, Calif., says, “Two details that I thought were incredible. First, the chimney is covered with RHEINZINK so they were committed. Even the shutters aren’t a different material.”
The Retreat
The residence comprises five cabins. Three sit parallel to the lake shore and are connected by glass and metal walkways. A fourth, also connected, angles away from the other three, and the fifth sits alone farther back in the woods. The cabins include five bedrooms, four baths, a powder room, a great room, a study/library and a garage with the central cabin holding the living and dining spaces. The study/library cabin has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and offers a view across the water to a distant lighthouse.
The 7-acre setting along the lake provided a peaceful context for the project, but it also had constraints. And within those constraints were the inspiration for the project. Christopher Guido, AIA, is principal at Chicago-based Booth Hansen, and was the project architect. He explains that even though there was a large area, the building footprint was limited. “There are a couple of zoning and site layout issues that come into play. There’s a setback from the water, and an easement for power.” The result is that the cabins needed to be arrayed between the easement and the setback, which lent itself to the train-like solution. The buildable area was approximately 800 feet long and 400 feet wide.
“When you’ve got nothing to narrow your focus,” says Guido, “that makes it harder in a way. But if you have some parameters and limitations, you can react to that.”
In this instance, the narrow band of buildable area along the shore prevented designing a large structure, which in turn inspired the separate cabins.
A Sense of Privacy
Each cabin is angled slightly differently to match the topography of the shoreline and to curate views across the lake, with a large window in the central, main cabin framing a view of a lighthouse across the water.
“It also breaks the scale down into human size,” says Guido. A long volume would have been overwhelming and since part of the goal was to have the structure recede into the woods, smaller forms facilitated that. In fact, the retreat is nearly invisible from the water.
The word “retreat” speaks to the idea of privacy, and the palette for the cabins enhances that privacy. The zinc-coated, basalt-colored RHEINZINK panels are matte finished and they match almost exactly the dark bark of the trees surrounding the building. That is what Elliott means when he says, “Its sense of context is the color that looks like the bark of the trees.”
“The woods are so dense there,” says Guido, “that when you look past the first line of trees, the woods go deep into shadow. We didn’t want to see the structure from the water, so a one-story, dark-colored building became the choice. We’re trying to make it recede into the shadows.”
When the owners are absent, shutters clad in the same paneling can be slid into place to cover the windows so that not even the glass can be seen. They also protect the building from the harsh winters if they are absent for a long period.
Sustainably, Carefully Built
As can be expected, building in such a pristine area has limitations other than zoning and easements. “When we visited the raw site on a rainy day,” says Guido, “we noticed tiny streams and surface water running into the lake. When we got to where we could actually build, we didn’t want the house to be a dam. That led to the idea of being as light on the land as possible.” So, they placed the cabins on piers.
Geothermal heat pumps from coils into the lake, heat water for an in-floor radiant heating system. “It is not officially a Passive House certified project,” says Guido, “but it uses the insulation and ventilation aspects from passive house.”
Lots of contractors and designers speak to the attention to detail, but in this project that detailing is manifest. Seams on the chimney and shutters line up with the roof and wall seams. Because gutters would have just filled with leaves, the eave line has no gutters and the careful attention to the joint shows. Water and snow just run off the roof to a graveled area around the house.
In fact, the size of the cabins was determined in large part by the width of the metal panels. “We needed to figure out what the optimal dimension was,” says Guido. That began with how wide the panels would be. “We generally knew how long the cabins would be and got it to the closest 16 inches. Then we added a couple of more inches to make it work. Once we got the module down to know what it was, we were able to layout the whole building.”