Points of View

Standing near a stone farmhouse in northern Ontario, that once served as a post office, architect Ian MacDonald gestures toward the surrounding rolling meadow and says, “The real estate agent who sold this land told my client he could just build a house on top of that hill, but I don’t think that would be a very interesting use of the site.” To illustrate his point, MacDonald points to a distant hill, and a large mansion that aggressively dominates the landscape – a lordly eyesore amid the otherwise classically beautiful scenery.

MacDonald has a reputation for designing homes that do not simply occupy a site but become an organic part of it. A similar country house he completed recently, for instance, is sleekly horizontal, with low-set windows that sweep across the property’s grassy plains. Here in Caledon, 70 kilometres north of Toronto, the landscape undulates, gently folding into low-lying hills and dipping into ravines. On this brilliant fall day, wind rakes through the blazing trees and tall grass. From the gravel road, one can barely see MacDonald’s latest creation, a two-storey house nested into the hillside of the 37‑hectare property. All that’s visible is the warped plane of a grass-covered rooftop and two periscope-like skylights sticking out.

At the entrance is a granite wall, and a mound topped with clover and climbing hydrangeas that over time will grow into braided vines that creep down the wall; and a stepped water feature that runs along one side of the house. Many of these defining features are intended to make the house self-sufficient. The pitched roof, with its shag of droughtresistant grass, will keep the interior cool in summer, and Galvalume steel cladding was chosen for its rugged durability. “The clients wanted a zero-maintenance house,” says MacDonald. “I told them there’s no such thing, but the Galvalume triples the service time of ordinary galvanized steel to more than 20 years.”

Inside, one reaches the main space – a combined living room, dining area and kitchen – by descending a polished concrete ramp just over 18 metres long. Glulam fir rafters define the room’s double-height ceiling, and quarter-sawn white oak was used for the flooring. From this central hub, one ascends to a corridor that leads to the children’s bedrooms, the family room, the master bedroom, the study and a gym. Another hall heads toward a more private wing that contains two guest bedrooms and a music room.

The main living area is surrounded on three sides by glass walls, opening up the space to the landscape from every direction. But as MacDonald points out, open meadows can be stark, especially in winter. He has been meticulous in not letting the more hostile natural elements overwhelm, and the windows – which reach as high as 3.8 metres – form an essay in matching scale and perspective. “There is an ancient Japanese tradition of leaving space for the imagination,” he says. “What visual information you strategically withhold is as important as what you leave in.” One of the home’s most poetic elements is an interior footbridge that links the bedroom suites with the main entrance, and sits below one of the periscopic skylights, which serve as an elegant way to draw in daylight, underscoring the house’s symbiotic relationship with nature. MacDonald’s practice is solidly modernist, influenced by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as Ron Thom, an early mentor. But while Wright’s houses rely on allusions to an American vernacular and Thom created his effects through virtuosic interior detailing, MacDonald is more concerned with the complex phenomenology of inhabitation, which requires him to work especially closely with his clients. “Ron Thom used to say that most people see just to avoid bumping into things,” he says. “A lot of what architects do is to help people see the opportunities of a site and the experiences it makes possible.”

Sitting outside on a concrete patio at the rear of the house, right at the meadow’s edge, one would never imagine that Toronto is less than an hour’s drive away. The babbling water feature cascading along the side of the house continues on to a natural brook that feeds into a pond system that eventually reaches an old barn, where the water is then recycled and pumped back up to the house. Designed by landscape architect Neil Turnbull, the pools are self-sustaining and teeming with life. Turnbull plans on giving a course for the clients’ children on this new ecosystem that’s evolving in their meadow. Country homes should be places to relax, to step back from our otherwise hectic urban lives. MacDonald’s house is contemplative without being melancholic: the building, and the undulating meadow with which it is intertwined, both shape and open endless possibilities of discovery.
Daniel Baird