Montréal-based Atelier Echelle creates a home overlooking the Saint Lawrence River as a community to welcome family and friends.
It is a rare opportunity for an architect to re-build his childhood home: a fortunate commission that allowed French-Canadian Mathieu Lemieux-Blanchard to revisit a site on the Saint Lawrence River. Alongside Veronica Lemieux-Blanchard, the founders of Atelier Echelle were responsible for a 4,000 sq.ft. house and 950 sq.ft. pavilion. The latter stands upon the foundations of a 1980s prefabricated structure that Mathieu knew intimately.
“My father helped build the original house with my grandfather,” remembers Mathieu. Lots in that part of Québec stretch for a kilometer, offering plenty of room for additional properties. “As part of the deal, dad got to build a 10×10-ft. shack deeper in the forest. My family spent every summer there when I was growing up. Neither home was winterised: there was no running water or electricity, which made for rustic living very close to nature. Veronica and I wanted to capture that sense of nature through big openings for our clients to experience the landscape transform as seasons change.”
Mathieu’s uncle, a Montréal judge, felt the original house was too cramped for accommodating guests. “We knew from the start that he wanted four bedrooms,” recalls Veronica, “a primary suite; a bedroom each for his two adult daughters; and another bedroom for friends. We agreed early on that the house would be clad in burnt cedar plank—Shou Sugi Ban—to contrast with snow in winter and add a silvery texture against summer colours. But rather than a top down approach, we always try to let the design evolve out of the project to extract the best of what it can be.”
The great room—an open space that combines kitchen, dining and living area oriented southwest towards the view—stems from the large space in the original house typical of casual Californian living. The owners want to foster the conviviality of large gatherings; at the same time when it is just the two of them, he wants to cook gourmet meals and she wants to craft or paint without noticing the absence of guests. “As a judge, he is on and off the bench for large blocks of time,” explains Veronica. “They are social and hospitable people. When friends head to the Gaspé for holidays, their home is always open for them as a pit stop en route.”
Rectangular in plan, the house’s exterior is defined by five steeply pitched roofs: a reference to the vernacular barn architecture of rural Québec while passively shedding snow in a region famous for white winters. “It was tricky deciding how to site the house so that my clients could see a lighthouse to the southwest from every bedroom,” notes Veronica. Oriented along a north-south axis, the main entry is from the east and leads directly into a foyer that acts as a hall for receiving guests. “We purposely designed the foyer without any seating,” she shares. “That’s the entry moment when people step in and immediately see the river. It is designed to give pause.”
Spaces within the home radiate outwards from the foyer. To the south is the guest bedroom wing; to the west is the outdoor kitchen and dining area; to the southwest is the swimming pool; to the west is the great room with access to the primary suite in the northwest; and to the north is the utility spaces: double carpark; mudroom for boots, outerwear and gear after countryside excursions on foot, snowshoes or skis; laundry room; and storage. Similar to restaurants and larger Asian homes, the kitchen contains an enclosed room for unsightly or smoky culinary experiments while the open portion merges with the great room for meal prep as a social event.
Materials reinforce the conversation between the Québec landscape and domesticity. Chunky 18-inch wide white oak planks specified as flooring throughout contrast against glistening tumbled Calcatta d’oro mosaic tiles finished honed and polished on the primary bathroom floor. White oak reappears as built-in cabinets and architraves along door and window openings to ground the home within the landscape, while stone and tile by Ciot add texture and durability to wet areas.
Atelier Echelle worked with father and daughter lighting studio Jeta for custom ceramic wall sconces in the bathrooms, with the balance of decorative light fixtures by Lambert et Fils. Heritage furnishings from the original house were re-used in the Winter Garden pavilion while the great room was furnished with a Ligne Roset daybed and Montauk sofa and armchairs. The dining table and chairs, mudroom bench and primary bed are all by Kastella.
“As a practice, we are about different scales,” explains Mathieu with the aside that échelle means scale in French. “We always ask ourselves what is the right balance. We intentionally used wide floor planks with tiny mosaic tiles.
We contrast through textures rather than pattern. We left walls neutral so that our clients can add their paintings and imprint over time. They have a lot of impressionistic art, which will inject colour to the space; plus the landscape is very colourful. In fact, we didn’t include any photos of sunsets because nobody would believe they are real images and not photo-shopped!”
Veronica agrees: “What we delivered is a good canvas.”
