This lakeside retreat's authors, Marie-Claude Hamelin and Loukas Yiacouvakis of yh2 architecture, have long experience of building in the Potton region of Québec. The architectural design studio, which was founded in 1994, takes a workshop-led approach, minimising the number of projects it takes on in order to dedicate itself to the holistic scope of each individual building, regardless of scale or programme. The award-winning studio has also worked in India, but its speciality is creating residential works that feel embedded in their surroundings.
The Counter-Slope House is located on the shores of Lake Memphremagog
Explore a lakeside retreat on the shores of Lake Memphremagog
The Counter-Slope House is a case in point. Set on a sloping site in a prime location on the shores of Lake Memphremagog, the house is embedded in the hillside, with a multi-functional windowless basement (containing stores, a gym and a cinema room) set beneath an expansive ground floor.
The expansive open plan living area has lake views throughout
The kitchen and living area feels embedded in the hillside
Here you’ll find an open-plan living area, with floor-to-ceiling glazing that takes advantage of the sloping site to make the room feel immersed in the forests at the water’s edge. With polished stone floors and exposed timber beams, one half of this floor is given over to living, with the other half occupied by the main bedroom suite. The staircase bisects the two areas, while the lake-facing façade is edged with a generous terrace.
The terrace outside the main living area
The terrace includes a spa and dining area, with the cantilevered upper floor providing a sheltered courtyard in the heart of the plan. The upper floor is also the entrance level, given the way the site slopes away from the access road, with a bridge reaching across to a glazed entrance hall adjoining the stairwell.
The house is accessed via a bridge to the top level
There’s a separate deck up here (the ceiling of the living space below), from where there are uninterrupted views of the lake. A butterfly-roofed structure houses three bedrooms, two of which double up as offices when the house isn’t fully occupied.
The entrance pavilion on the upper level
Two bedrooms cantilever over the main living floor
According to the designers, ‘the project unfolds as a response to the dramatic nature of the site, an attempt at respectful coexistence with the expressive qualities of the terrain’. Unusually, the house doesn’t reveal itself all at once, with the roof of the main volume serving as what the architects call a ‘belvedere’, a space that is ‘threshold, reception area, and visual vanishing point’. It creates a rare horizontal space in a crowded, steep wooded site, a place to pause and contemplate the landscape.
The upper level creates a horizontal platform in the forest
Internal joinery is finished in white oak, while the exterior is clad in natural cedar, which will weather as the house ages. The combination of unusual vantage points and close integration with nature throughout the living spaces create ‘an architectural meditation on landscape’.
‘[The Counter-Slope House] questions how architecture can inhabit a site not as an object, but as a condition for experiencing place,’ say Hamelin and Yiacouvaki. ‘[It is] an architecture of subtraction that reveals more than it imposes.’
