Instead of the simple reno they had in mind, a couple finds their dream home in this cliffside natural beauty.
Tired of the long winters, and resolute that their retirement would involve less snow shovelling, this mountain-loving Calgary couple looked to Victoria, where their children were attending university at the time. After three years spent searching, they found their dream property — a protected, south-facing waterfront home with good transport connections to get off-Island — and Murray and Julie embarked on a renovation turned new build.
They started by working with the team at Horizon Pacific Contracting, who connected them with architect Pamela Úbeda to help transform the existing house, which dated back to the late 1980s/early 1990s, through a new roofline and slew of interior upgrades. But when the contractors broke ground, what they discovered threw a spanner in the works.
“It turns out there was a whole lot wrong with that old house. You name it, it was wrong with it,” says Dave Fallows, project manager. “There comes a time when you look at the structure of the house and that’s what we did.” Once they did, it became apparent that it would have cost the owners nearly as much to renovate as to rebuild.
“At the end of the day, that was what led us to [reconsider],” says Julie. “If we’re going to stay here for the next 20 or 30 years, we should look into the new build.”
All the Mod Cons and More
Fortunately, they were already working with Úbeda. Her portfolio of West Coast modern residential new builds, coupled with her familiarity with the property and the owners, made for an exciting prospect.
On deciding to start from scratch, they tried different configurations of the home, but in the end it was clear that the original footprint made the most of the lot. (As Fallows says: “The old house filled the lot, this one fills the lot.”) The new design maintained a similar floor plan, adding a single bedroom on the main floor that extended along the angle of the shoreline.
“We were able to add the things that we wouldn’t have been able to in the renovation, like the deck expansion, higher ceilings and [a design that] takes advantage of views on all three floors,” says Julie.
With the long term in mind, the new design reimagined what aging in place could look like for Murray and Julie, who would have had to negotiate the original bungalow’s sunken floors.
A Roof that Makes Waves
Approaching the house from the street, you literally arrive at the same elevation as the roof, if not a little higher. “The really interesting thing about this project, architecturally, is that because you’re entering from the top of the second floor, at street level you can see the rear roof from the street, so it was really important what these roofs looked like,” says Úbeda.
After undertaking multiple roof studies and mocking up a flat roof, a shed roof and a butterfly roof, they finally settled on a curved roof.
“It wasn’t even a metaphor,” says Úbeda with a laugh. “It just seemed like the right gentle approach from the street to the ocean.”
