Go Home Bay Cabin is a residential project designed by Ian MacDonald.
It is located in Ontario, Canada.
Go Home Bay Cabin by Ian MacDonald:
“The site for this house is a 55 acre parcel of gently sloping meadow on the Niagara Escarpment overlooking the Beaver Valley, two hours north of Toronto. An existing barn located close to the Township road bordering the south edge of the property, lends rural character and a sense of history to the site, while helping to frame an ideal view to the valley beyond.
Accessible only by water, the property’s mature trees fragment their views of the low-slung volume. It is only as visitors climb up from the dock through a juniper meadow, surrounded by tall white pines, that they see the building clearly as a charcoal-coloured cedar shingle box. The lightness on the land is instantly evident in the construction: a form cantilevered off concrete piers so that it floats over a whaleback outcropping of granite.
The carefully sequenced interior spaces underscore a rich connection to the landscape. Entering into a simple vestibule from the south deck, visitors’ views are largely withheld to delay and therefore intensify their effect. Visitors then pass into the long kitchen, which doubles as a corridor along the back of the cabin, connecting the principal areas and ending in a cozy window seat complete with a woodstove and views to the extensive forest behind. This space serves as counterpoint to the big water views in the adjacent main room where some 42 linear feet of windows look west toward the open Go Home Bay channel. Here, the ground plane drops out of view, and the short middle ground is lost. This obscuring engages the visitor’s imagination, resulting in a more idealized perception of the scale and drama of the landscape, which ultimately defines one’s memory of the place.”
Photos courtesy of Ian MacDonald
