Bass Island

The ambition was a house that is structure and opening window wall, with Lake Muskoka doing the work of a fourth room. The Building Code limits how much of a wall can be glass, so the openness comes from three oversized folding glass wall systems that give an unobstructed panorama of the south end of the lake. Opened up, the main floor feels like it sits directly out over the water.

The original owners took the technology further. Laminated switchable smart glass darkens at the flick of a switch in the private areas, and every room has its own touch screen thermostat. In a departure from the usual advice to buy local, they imported artisan tile from Italy and Spain and smart toilets from Japan.

The cottage steps down the bedrock in tray-like levels, so every floor keeps its view and its own way out onto the granite. Long-span composite beams carry the larger window openings, and flat roofs with deep overhangs hold the profile down in the treetops. There is less wall and roof in the way, so the building reads as part of the shoreline instead of an object sitting on it.

Douglas fir timbers, granite from a local quarry, clear red cedar and metallic oxide coated windows give the modern form a rustic feel that is at home in Muskoka. Four wood-burning fireplaces, one of them stainless steel on the cedar deck, carry the cottage through the shoulder seasons. The glass reflects wind-tossed jack pines and whatever the sky is doing that afternoon.

The starting point was Arthur Erickson, the Canadian architect who worked out how to put buildings on difficult ground. The Graham House he designed with Geoffrey Massey in West Vancouver in 1962 descended a 40 foot rock cliff above the ocean in levels rather than fighting the slope. It was demolished in 2007 to make way for something larger.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater was the other reference. The owners expected a weekend house across from the falls at Bear Run; Wright cantilevered it over them, so the family lived in the middle of the thing they had come to look at. Different site, different clients, different budget and different technology here, so Bass Island is its own building, but the intent is the same.

The cottage has changed hands. The current owners have renovated with more rustic, authentic Muskoka materials, which makes the point better than the original argument did: traditional materials and contemporary design can share a building and improve each other.

Whether a cottage ends up contemporary or traditional, its form should look like it belongs to the owners and to their slice of shoreline. Bass Island still gets talked about every summer on Lake Muskoka.