Tour A Minimalist House With A Seamless Indoor Outdoor Connection

We really wanted a minimalist house, not a lot of detailing, but choice of materials was of utmost importance. I find that a lot of modernist architecture, if the materials are cold and stark, then I think the house feels cold and stark. So we wanted a minimalism for sure, but everything had to be like a warm, earthy type material. So finding minimalism that felt still warm and homey, so to speak. I didn't want a set of stairs up to the front door. I wanted the stairs to blend into the landscape. And so there was a long, graceful steps intermingled with big landings. And then we actually brought a lot of greenery around the front set of the stairs to actually make the stairs feel like they're sunken into the landscape, as opposed to sticking out of the landscape. It's 14 steps without it looking like it was 14 steps. We wanted the inside and the outside of the house to be a seamless integration. And so you open the front door, you come into the vestibule, I guess, and there's an open slatted wall. It continues all the way down the length of the house, and those slats open up to create a partial view into the landscape. You hang your coat, you come through, and boom, you have a tree in the middle of the house to bring the landscape into the house. That was one of Vanessa's ideas, and I thought it was brilliant when she came up with that. And then as you come around the corner down the hallway, then obviously the landscape opens up because it's just a sheer glass wall right from the front to the back. There's not a lot of windows to the front of the house, and that's more for privacy, but the back of the house, we wanted completely open to the landscape. We wanted the spaces to look open and have good sight lines from the inside to the outside. And so from the vantage point where we are now, I can basically see the whole backyard and we can see all the way through the house. But we needed to create a little bit of separation between the living room and the dining room and the family room. So we did it in a way where it was open but still divided. So we have the floating fireplace in the center of the house here between the living room and the dining room. And then we have a family room at the far end, and that is separated, obviously, but it's separated by glass, so you can still have sight lines through. We wanted, again, very simple, clean lines, minimalism, but we also wanted it to feel homey and not cold. There was a lot of plushness that was added with the furniture and the accessories that added another layer of coziness to it, I think, even though it is a very sleek, modern type place. We both love to cook. When we're entertaining, sometimes we're still preparing meals while people are having drinks and appetizers and security boards and so forth. And so we have quite a few peninsulas and quite a few counters for people to sit around and congregate. The center island in the kitchen, our thought process was that food comes across that counter and then from the pantry counter with another bar sink as the drinks come across the other counter. But really an important element was having the indoor kitchen tied into the outdoor kitchen because we find that so many meals are half prepared inside, half prepared outside, especially in the summer. Hence the sliding pocket door, which was another one of Vanessa's ideas. So when the sliding pocket door opens, it becomes one really big kitchen with lots of counter space, lots of island space for people to gather around. As you can probably tell, I like to eat. We like to entertain, and sometimes we're having a pizza party, so we need a pizza oven. I love to barbecue on charcoal. With charcoal, it's hard to control temperatures. We have an Argentinian style grill where by turning the wheel, it raises the grate up and down off the heat so you can control the heat. Sometimes we're quick, we just wanna throw something on the barbecue, so I needed a gas grill as well. The egg smoker unit, I already owned that, but I needed to find a place for it in the kitchen and it's all stainless steel. And then much to my wife's initial dismay, we had to put in a deep fryer for steak and frites. We only ever use it for steak and frites, but every once in a while, we wanna have a nice steak and frites meal. I always joke that in my next life, I'll probably be a short order cook. We have heaters in the ceiling, which radiate heat and warms up the outdoor space quite a bit. We have bug screens that come down, and that helps control the wind, but it also helps keep bugs out. We wanted to have a view of a TV if there's a hockey game going on, a soccer game, a tennis match, when we do need it for an event like that, then it pops out of the ceiling. And that extends our season longer than the two summer months that we have here in Canada. The backyard design started with trying to keep clean lines and minimalism with the hardscaping at least. Really, there's one long retaining wall that goes across the back property line because our neighbor behind us was much higher than the main floor of the house. So that was required by function. And then into the back wall, we put in a change room, storage room, an outdoor bathroom. The other cabana on the other side is where all the pool equipment is. The look of the pool was paramount. It's centered on this window on the back of the house, the curtain wall. And as you look out, you see the pool, but the negative edge, the reason for that is more for aesthetics than anything else. And it's a dark bottom pool to create a mirror effect. So during the day and the evenings, the landscape is completely reflected into the house if you're looking at it from this angle, looking back. If you're on that angle, looking back at the house, there's actually a perfect reflection of the house mirrored on the pool. When we're designing the interior of minimal spaces to make them look warm, I think outside is making them look green. There's a few bursts of color here and there, but for the most part, it's a very green, lush garden. And we wanted it to feel like we were at a resort. If we're sitting by the pool loungers, if we are having a drink around the fire table, we wanted to look out and have it look like we'd be in a luxury hotel anywhere in the world. We have multiple seating areas. Again, with the integration of the indoor-outdoor kitchen, we slide the dining room doors open and that's integrated into an indoor-outdoor dining space. We have the indoor family room, the outdoor family room, the indoor living room, the outdoor living room, and they're all mirror each other on either sides of the glass windows. The fireplace at the far end, that's a wood-burning fire. Sometimes when we had guests, they didn't like the smoky smell of being around a wood-burning fire, so we actually created a fireplace where the smoke exits up through the chimney so we could have a wood-burning fire without smelling like you're at a campfire. We actually bring those in from Belgium, a company called Rolf Living, and they are beanbag chairs in the middle of the lawn, but they also double as a floatie in the pool. It's amazing, and then when we're done using them as a floatie, we just bring it back and it's a beanbag chair. They're very cool. Part of bringing the outside in is that the limestone wall on the outside continues into the inside in the vaulted ceiling, and we created this curtain wall where from the first floor, the second floor, you have a view into the garden, and we needed to fill the space with something, but we didn't want a traditional chandelier. We actually looked extensively, and this is actually an XYZ fixture by Baibo. They're a lighting manufacturer in Portugal, and they create these minimalist designs with these carbon fiber tubes, and it kind of gives you, not an overly in-your-face pendant that would block the views or take your eye away from the rest of the landscape. The story is that it started as a steel staircase, modern, but again, those materials started feeling cold. The carcass of the staircase is done in solid oak, all cut on CNC machines, and then we had this fellow from Surface One, and he is an amazing craftsman, and he took Corian, and he molded it to the curves of the stairs. He molded in a handrail, and he created one seamless piece of Corian that starts in the basement and goes all the way up to the second floor, so three stories of a seamless piece of Corian with a seamless integrated handrail. It's quite a sculptural element in the house, and we're really happy with the way it turned out. For the bedroom suite, we wanted a real feel of us traveling, again, at another luxury hotel, and so we have our sleeping quarters at the far end, and those sleeping quarters have open panoramic views to the whole garden and the landscape, and we have a sliding pocket door that divides that area from the rest of the bedroom, and then, again, to be like a hotel suite, we have a coffee maker, we have a little sink, we have our showers, our walk-in closets for both of us, our double sinks, and every room in the house, every closet has a skylight to allow natural light in. It was an amazing process building this house over the three years that it takes from design to moving in. I had a lot of fun doing it. Our vision in the beginning of having a modern minimalist house integrated into the landscape, I think we were able to create that, and I'm very happy with the way it turned out. I think it was quite amazing.