Nicole and Shane Hambly are no strangers to the Blue Mountain region. They’ve been weekenders and members of Alpine Ski Club their entire lives.

But it took the pandemic to give them the push they needed to move up here full time.

At that point, the couple put their son, Knox, who is now 8, into Pretty River Academy and went from living in their 3,000-square-foot new build in Etobicoke to living full time in their “weekend” condo up here.

“He was in third grade. We were living with one dog and a kid in a 1,000-square-foot condo,” laughs Nicole, a business development officer with ZO Skin Health.

So, when it came time to sell their Toronto digs and move up here permanently, they decided to go big. Very big. Eight thousand square feet big, in fact.

But you wouldn’t know it from the outside, or especially the inside, of their modern farmhouse.

Why? Every room in the custom new build, including the cathedral-ceilinged living room with its soaring fireplace, is perfectly proportioned.

“I wanted big, but cozy,” says Nicole. And the couple achieved that in spades.
Their only nod to the space they were working with is a large, airy, light-filled two-storey entrance hall with an Italian terrazzo-tiled floor.

Nicole calls it her “grand entrance.” And it is, indeed, that.

In the middle stands a round wooden table that she decorates according to the season. The hall is also where the family had their Christmas tree, erected shortly after they moved in.

But what truly steals the show are the views from the wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor, black-framed mullion windows the couple had installed wherever they could.

Shane, a vice-president of real estate with E INC, explains that the house was positioned so that the living area overlooks the fifth hole of The Georgian Bay Club, of which he is a member, and Georgian Bay itself, while the rooms facing the front of the home look up at the forested escarpment.