Bringing the Outside In

This contemporary Meaford home uses natural light and a balance between farm and forest views to create a sophisticated yet calming oasis

by Janet Lees, photography by Lorne Bridgman

From the outside, the home has a somewhat barn-like structure – a signature of architectural designer Jim Campbell – with pre-finished, stained wood cladding topped by a standing seam metal roof.

When Helen and Chris Thomson decided to build a custom home, they knew they didn’t want a water view. “With a water view you’re facing north, so you walk into your house on a sunny day and it’s so dark inside that your eyes have to adjust; it makes your house dark when it’s beautiful outside,” says Helen. It can also be difficult to balance the heat in a north-facing home because the western side can get very hot.

The open dining room is flanked by a wall of sliding glass doors and a strip of glass floor to draw the light through to the lower level.

In the hallway to the main living area, a mixture of antique barn board on the left and board-formed concrete on the right create a natural feeling reminiscent of walking through an Escarpment crevice.

So instead, the Thomsons opted for a south-facing home on the edge of a ravine in Meaford, with vistas of farmland on one side and forest on the other. Working with architectural designer Jim Campbell of Rockside Campbell Design and builder Frank Wyssen of Creek Valley Inc., the Thomsons created a modern home that uses light, views and energy-efficiency in all the right ways.

Helen, a former interior designer, worked closely with Campbell to achieve the desired result. “I knew certain things I wanted, and Jim knew how to make them work,” she recalls. “I said I want windows that come down to the ground, I want boarded concrete, I want some glass floors, but I wouldn’t have known how to use those to get the same result.”

The kitchen cabinets, designed by homeowner Helen Thomson, feature dark wood, sleek metal bar pulls, and open shelving.

In the living room, pink adds splashes of “happy” colour against a brown sofa and dark wood built-in entertainment centre. The concrete wall on the far right extends to the top of the house, with a hidden “window” to wash warming light over the concrete.

a mix of colours, textures and materials provides lots of interest yet works together to create a calming vibe.

She also specified that the house should be no more than 23 feet wide with an open living room, dining room and kitchen in order to allow natural light to travel across the entire space. As a result, the main living areas are so awash with sunlight that artificial lighting usually isn’t needed until late in the day.

The placement of windows and the exterior design of the house not only allow maximum light, but also control heat. “In the summer when the sun is high and strong, the eaves protect the house from getting too hot, and in the winter when it’s cold outside and the sun is low, we get the warmth from the sun, so it’s very energy efficient.”

While the main space is very open, the challenge was to create levels of separation in the rest of the house, notes Campbell. “Helen had ideas in terms of form, but our job is usually to deduce out of those ideas what the root is, and in this case it had a lot to do with positive separation between family members so everybody felt at ease and comfortable in the house, not stepping on each other’s toes.”

In the master bedroom, a barnwood wall takes the place of a headboard and faces an oversized sliding door to a private deck.

“In the summer when you open all the doors and windows, it sort of feels like you’re camping,” says Helen.

When the house was built in 2010, the Thomsons’ three children were in their teens and the couple worked mainly from home (they still do), so it was important to achieve a level of privacy and sound dampening between the living areas, the two home offices and the bedrooms as well as in the basement entertainment area and home gym.

The solution was to use a combination of concrete, antique barn board and dark-stained pine walls for acoustic and physical separation. “We exposed the foundations and extended them with board-formed concrete to get a nice, rustic quality with a material that we’re using anyway in the foundation,” says Campbell. “Thermally, it’s a really good solution in the case of the basement because all of the insulation is outside of the concrete, so we have a nice thermal mass. Durability was also a factor, because the kids were really into sports, so the basement initially had to withstand soccer balls, basketballs and ball hockey.”

The master bath boasts a soaker tub with a view, a glassed-in shower and Carrara marble vanity top.

The open staircase is an architectural marvel of floating pine steps, glass sides and black metal railings lit by a multi-level vertical window during the day and a contemporary chrome chandelier at night. “The stairs are not rectangular,” notes Campbell. “They’re at a slight angle, which is not only more interesting but also more functional to give you a path of least resistance from point A to point B.” The upper level has loft workspaces that are open to the level below.

An interior concrete wall extends from the bottom to the top of the house, separating the home gym from the entertainment space downstairs, the master suite from the living area on the first floor, and the bedrooms and office on the second storey.

To add interest, the concrete was board-formed, a process in which a wooden form is built on-site to hold the wet concrete in place. As the concrete dries, the finished face takes on the wood grain pattern from the form. This technique visually softens and warms concrete’s somewhat cooler appearance while maintaining its strength and insulating properties.

“It’s a little bit of a reference to the past, because with early use of concrete, that’s how it was formed originally,” says Campbell.

The lower level has high ceilings and walkouts to the forest and ravine behind, so it doesn’t feel like a basement.

This interior concrete wall also includes a hidden but crucial detail – a long, narrow glass ‘window’ tucked up in front of the wall to filter light through from the windows on the second floor. This also helps warm and soften the look of the concrete.

“If you hit concrete with a lot of sunlight it doesn’t have the same effect as if you can wash the wall with light vertically,” explains Campbell. “If you pour the light in from the top, you’ll emphasize the texture of the concrete, picking up the light and shadows. It’s fun because you don’t know where the light is coming from until you’re right next to the wall.”

On the upper level, the two loft office spaces are joined by a floating bridge, built like a ramp and running at a different angle to the stairs below.

In the hallway, walls are slightly diagonal to create a feeling of walking through the crevices and caves of the Escarpment.

The glass floor on the main level filters light to the floor below.

The main-floor powder room sits in a boarded concrete block with open space above.

This use of borrowed light – natural light that enters an otherwise dark area from an adjoining space through windows or skylights – is a signature of Campbell’s design sensibility. Another particularly creative example in the Thomson house is a strip of glass floor spanning the length of the main living space along one wall, which draws the light through to the lower floor.

There are some structural challenges to using glass in a load-bearing area, so in both cases Campbell turned to Dan Barill of Barill Engineering in Collingwood to make sure the glass could support the floor above.

With some interior walls at a slight angle and light filtering in from above, the overall effect gathers inspiration from exploring the caves and crevices of the Niagara Escarpment upon which the home is perched, something Campbell has returned to with subsequent projects. “This was the first project where we were really exploring the whole idea of emulating the Escarpment structure in terms of crevices and creating Escarpment-like spaces,” he says.

A breezeway separates the garage at left with the house at right.

Inside, a vertical window draws light through a hallway.

Homeowner Helen Thomson loves working in her cosy loft office space on the top floor, with windows providing views to both the outside and the inside.

In order for the interior to adequately reflect the Escarpment, the siting of the home on its 35-acre lot also had to be just right. “We wanted to position the building so you have your feet in both worlds,” he says. “The one view is a very pastoral/agricultural aspect that is very Southern Ontario and the other view is more tied directly to this area with the ruggedness of the land and the trees. It’s straddling the border between the agricultural and the natural world. It’s an awesome place to be because you can pick your view depending on your mood, the cosiness of the forest or the expansiveness of the land. It gives you the option to connect with the exterior in two very different ways.”

The outdoor entertainment area is off the front of the house instead of the back, with a pool, hot tub, outdoor kitchen, dining area, pergola, bar and two fireplaces.

In the 10 years since the house was built, the Thomson family has grown and changed along with the landscape, and their beloved home continues to be a source of comfort and inspiration. “With a water view, things don’t really change very much, and I really like that this changes,” says Helen. “The trees are constantly changing. The summer is completely different than the winter; the fall and spring are beautiful. And if I don’t feel like looking at trees, all I have to do is turn around.” ❧

To see more of photographer Lorne Bridgman’s work, visit lornebridgman.com