A new home replenishes Quebec’s vanishing stock of farmhouses.When a Toronto couple with shared interests in land conservation and craftsmanship approached Lee and Macgillivray Architecture Studio (LAMAS) to build a new home on their 200-acre property in North Hatley, Quebec, a fertile partnership took root. The couple, an artist and a farmer, had bought the land—originally two adjacent farms—15 years earlier and wanted to replace the derelict homestead on one of them with a new house now that they had retired and were spending more time there. While attending a dinner party in North Hatley, the couple were delighted to learn that their hosts’ son, James Macgillivray, was a Princeton-and Harvard-trained architect.
The timing was perfect for everyone, as Macgillivray had recently left Peter Gluck and Partners in New York to launch his own studio with his partner, Vivian Lee, and was looking for opportunities to build their reputation. "It was our first project from the ground up, our first baby as a company," Lee says. "It was all we would think about when we weren’t teaching."
It was this process that led them to the realization that the house would best take advantage of the views, the prevailing wind, and the movements of the sun if it adopted a more circular form. "It seemed like this ‘eureka’ moment, where we had this pinwheel," Lee recalls. The final structure expresses typical farmhouse elements in new ways, with its three connected buildings circling around a central courtyard so that the windows often align to frame the landscape through other interior views. The result is a building that looks largely traditional from the exterior, but whose modern interior produces a mesmerizing telescoping effect.
The timing was perfect for everyone, as Macgillivray had recently left Peter Gluck and Partners in New York to launch his own studio with his partner, Vivian Lee, and was looking for opportunities to build their reputation. "It was our first project from the ground up, our first baby as a company," Lee says. "It was all we would think about when we weren’t teaching."
It was this process that led them to the realization that the house would best take advantage of the views, the prevailing wind, and the movements of the sun if it adopted a more circular form. "It seemed like this ‘eureka’ moment, where we had this pinwheel," Lee recalls. The final structure expresses typical farmhouse elements in new ways, with its three connected buildings circling around a central courtyard so that the windows often align to frame the landscape through other interior views. The result is a building that looks largely traditional from the exterior, but whose modern interior produces a mesmerizing telescoping effect.
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