The dual logic of a pinwheel house in Canada

A young couple in search of a “decongested” lifestyle from the metropolitan hustle and bustle, and a privileged relationship with nature, commissioned Reflect Architecture for their buen retiro amidst the uncontaminated scenery of Ontario, 45 minutes north of Toronto. The challenge of the project, as the firm’s director Trevor Wallace states, was to create a dwelling that opens up to nature without renouncing domestic intimacy and allowing clients to feel both integrated and protected in the landscape. Such dialectic design approach is eloquently expressed through the choices of orientation, and mass articulation, as well as in the material lexicon. The house consists of three essential single-level volumes, set in the gently sloping topography of the site and distributed radially like a pinwheel pivoting on the forest-facing garden.

On the west side of the lot, the exterior façade takes the form of a tight screen of monolithic concrete walls preventing visual introspection from neighbouring properties and only splitting up at the entrances. On the internal front, the concavity of the layout embraces the garden and the fronts dematerialise into large sliding glass windows that trigger an uninterrupted perceptual and fruitive connection with the landscape.

The arrangement of the blocks clearly allocates the functional programmes: the east block with the main entrance houses the living room, services and guest bedrooms; the central block the kitchen and dining area; the west block the private rooms and a small courtyard for yoga.

In the interiors, the fluid sequence of spaces flooded with light and unconditionally oriented towards the landscape unveils cosy and welcoming atmospheres, emphasised by the dialectic of materials (stone and wood in the floors and walls, steel and glass in the fixtures) and by furnishings and textiles in soft, earthy tones.