Mirror Point Cottage is a vacation home for a local fisherman’s daughter, her Dutch husband, who has a taste for minimalism, and their two young children on a lake in Nova Scotia. It is formally expressed as an elevated, 80-foot long extruded ‘fish shed’ supported by a steel aedicule and a board-formed concrete entry core. The client wanted their life in their home on the lake to be based on two important elements: time spent with their favourite people and enjoyment of the natural surroundings. For us, those two ideas are very much related.
Fishing is one of Nova Scotia’s oldest industries, demonstrated by the weathered fishing shacks lining its coast. The Mirror Point cottage demonstrates the frugality of the Nova Scotian vernacular in an elegant manner. The rusted steel aedicule contains a sunken outdoor summer kitchen. This terrace built from hemlock decking offers a sheltered place at grade for the grandparents to watch their grandchildren playing on the beach. The garage/bunkie acts as a miniature version of the main house.
The building is precisely sited using existing topography to maximize southern passive solar energy and views to the lake and to minimize the removal of existing hardwood trees. This hovering building forms a gate that frames the view of the lake on arrival to the site. The southern façade is entirely operable with large sliding glass panels. When opened up, the façade allows for the elevated volume to act as a giant porch open to the environment and intimately connected to the lake shore. The thick totemic north wall protects and insulates the interior from the public, north side and continuous outsulation on walls and roof provides high R-value and minimizes thermal bridging. This passive solar dwelling has a high thermal mass concrete floor, and hydronic in floor heating.
Mirror Point cottage is committed to ‘place’. It is designed with a respect of traditional coastal language and employs a formal inventiveness with common local materials. Materially this is a ‘sweet and sour’ building, combining highly crafted western red cedar millwork with banal economical SPF gang nail trusses, which are common in contemporary North American House construction. These ‘gang-nail’ wood structural components were used extensively to reduce the amount of structural steel and cost. These ordinary materials, normally covered up, are celebrated in the living and dining space and are juxtaposed against natural cedar millwork and pine shiplap painted white.
The exterior is clad in local eastern white cedar shingles and a standing seam metal roof. Building on a traditional understanding of local wood construction, different wood species were used based on their natural properties and historical application. The cedar shingles contain natural preservatives and are better suited to the local climate and the hemlock terrace is naturally rot-resistant. With its inherent high level of environmental sustainability, its affordability, and its subtly refined aesthetic, our practice builds upon this understated, everyday language of construction, through projects like Mirror Point.
