This Canadian guest house is ‘silent but with more to say’

Stillness and drama converge in this Canadian guest house by Halifax-based MacKay-Lyons Sweatapple Architects on the country's East Coast. The project, a retreat attached to a larger estate including a little boathouse and a larger main house currently under construction by the same practice, has just been completed and ticks all the boxes for its typology: a serene, yet powerful, restorative place to engage with its coastal landscape – earning it a nod for best retreat in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025.

Tour El Aleph: a quiet, yet dramatic Canadian guest house

Brian MacKay-Lyons is the practice’s co-founder and the architect behind numerous private homes as well as Shobac, his own farm compound and architecture education centre on the Atlantic coast. He first came upon the plot that comprises the complex some 20 years ago. He attempted building on it twice in the past, for different clients and with varied briefs, before, third time lucky, his current clients, from New York, provided him with the perfect excuse to go at it again. ‘Every time we returned to the site starting from scratch,’ he says.

The guest house sits on a lot that faces, on one side, land that is said to be sacred to the region’s Indigenous Mi’kmaq People, and a headland on the opposite end. It’s on an uplift ridge and the surf comes in and out across its millions of years old rocky ledge. ‘Elemental’ seems to be an understatement for a site that feels mesmerisingly wild and open to the weather. It was a perfect fit for MacKay-Lyons, whose studio is known for crafting quiet buildings with a strong presence and a story to tell.

The main home, which was designed at the same time as the guest structure but is larger and currently about a year off from completion, is drum-shaped and features a square courtyard at its heart (‘It’s our nod to Louis Khan’s Exeter Library,’ McKay-Lyons says). Its shape was extruded and conceptually moved to a position nearly a kilometre away; it became the guest house. It is placed on the promontory’s granite bedrock on stilts. ‘When you’re there, it feels like you’re alone in the world,’ says the architect. ‘You can see the other structures but it’s a long journey from anywhere, it’s remote and dangerous, as well as spiritual, so it’s the perfect place to feel the solitude and be in tune with nature.’

Large openings, crafted around vistas and treating the four façades as a single, continuous ‘wrapper’, allow residents to be at one with their environment. Doors draw back and the living space becomes open to the elements – a risky choice, perhaps, as during a storm, MacKay-Lyons recalls, the rough sea and wind at one point threw a large rock through a neighbour’s roof. This fierce relationship was part of the goal. The architect adds: ‘We thought about it as a panopticon – a concept that allows you to see 360-degree ocean and landscape views. This is also where the project’s name – El Aleph – comes from, referencing Jorge Luis Borges’ book of the same name that describes the ultimate panopticon, a place from where you can see everything in the universe. ’

While refined formal detailing and rigorous spatial planning make for a finely tuned architectural experience, there is also a roughness and toughness about El Aleph, wrapped as it is in a thin, continuous leaded copper skin. ‘The landscape and the building share this,’ MacKay-Lyons says.

‘The guesthouse is manmade but also timeless, a 28ft pure cube. It has a strong relationship to the land and feels solid, but it’s also floating. There is a charge and energy between it and the natural context – architecture is not copying nature, but feeding off it.’

Large, opening-free areas on the façades allow moments of quiet, a kind of ‘white’ space that acts as a ‘breather’ to this tension, he says. The materials are not precious and might change appearance over time, but this was not about creating a precious retreat, the architect is quick to point out. ‘Louis Khan talks a lot about silence. There’s a lot of noise in the world. We want to make buildings that are more invisible and more silent. Silent but with more to say.’

mlsarchitects.ca

All of the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025 winners will be celebrated online over the coming month and are featured in full in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today