Family retreat in the Townships
BUSY COUPLE overcame many challenges to build their country home, which features a private lake
Alexand Colin Ryan are busy Montreal professionals. Alex is an investment adviser and Colin, who trained as an engineer, is a venture capitalist. Both travel a great deal for their respective jobs. When they hit their mid-30s and with two children, they decided it was time to look for a second home in the country, where they could wind down from city life.
“At first we went looking for a cottage in the Eastern Townships,” Colin said. (He grew up in St-Étienne-de-Bolton.) “We had a budget of $300,000 and although we looked all over the area, we really couldn’t find anything we liked.”
That changed in 2003, when Colin came across what he considered to be the ideal spot for their growing family. There was only one snag — but a pretty major one. The asking price was double their budget. Moreover, the property, which encompassed 15 hectares, had no house, other than a rundown log cabin.
Alex was on a business trip at the time and when Colin spoke to her on the phone, he had quite a job convincing her that this spot — a rocky promontory in West Bolton — was indeed what they had been looking for.
“Colin said to me, ‘I know that when you see the place, you’re going to love it,’ ” Alex recalled. “I was determined NOT to love it and, of course, the minute I walked around the property, that was it. We bought it!”
What persuaded Alex in the end were the location and the setting. The Ryans realized they would have to build something from scratch, and while that was easier said than done (there was barely a flat piece of land on the property), the pros appeared to outweigh the cons. Not only was the site secluded and surrounded by mature trees, it had a private lake — the perfect playground for a family.
Having acquired the land and the lake, clearing the lot proved quite a challenge. It involved blasting away much of the rock and clearing brush. But before the Ryans could get to that stage, they had to get permission to put in a driveway from the main road, so they could access the site.
“Right next to the road, the area was zoned green,” Colin said. “We pointed out to the Commission de protection du territoire agricole, which regulates such things, that the land, which is virtually all granite, wasn’t arable. Not only that, there was a dirt track already running along the lake, so all we were asking was to upgrade it. It took 11 months of tussling with the CPTAQ, but eventually we got the go-ahead.”
The couple’s next challenge was deciding what type of building to construct. Even after all the blasting, the house would have to be erected within a limited footprint because there were cliffs on every side. (It ended up having only 1.5 metres of clearance around it.)
In the end, they opted for a custom-built home from Viceroy. The Ryans reckoned that instead of building horizontally (initially, they’d envisioned a long, low bungalow), it would be more practical to build vertically, to create enough space to accommodate their large families.
“I have five siblings and Colin is from a family of five,” Alex said. “So at any given time we can have 24 people sitting down to dinner.”
The Viceroy option meant that the couple had an empty shell to work with, allowing them to decorate and configure the house more or less the way they wanted it. They had the help of an architect and an interior designer, but they also sourced many of the materials themselves (locally and in Montreal), such as the grey granite countertops in the kitchen, the wooden doors and the pre-oiled hardwood floors.
“The plan for the Viceroy home didn’t come with a basement, so we hired somebody to design one for us and basically put the house on top of that. We also ordered some extra windows from Viceroy — it’s one of the services they provide — so they would match the windows in the rest of the house.”
As they went along, the interior decorator and the contractor who built the house gave the Ryans lots of tips. They showed them how to take advantage of what would have been wasted space underneath stairways and the roof, by creating oddly shaped cupboards (“very useful for storage”) and explaining the correct way to lay the hardwood floors.
“Apparently, planked floors should be installed vertically,” Alex said. “If they’re laid horizontally, they appear to be striped. That would never have occurred to me!”
“We learned so much,” Colin said, “but sometimes I look around and think of some of the things we should have done, like putting in under-floor heating. We did, however, install a geothermal unit. It was expensive to install, so right now, it doesn’t save us money on our heating bills, but in 10 years or so, it’ll probably pay off.”
The two-storey (plus a now finished basement) home has a total living space of 4,000 square feet. It has five bedrooms, three bathrooms (plus a powder room), a den, family room, playroom and an open-plan kitchen/ living room with a sloping cathedral ceiling and floorto-ceiling windows. Off the living room is an L-shaped dining area (the original plan called for two rooms), with large dining tables and chairs — the scene of many family gatherings.
The Ryans have decorated the house in sparse style (“we spend so much time outdoors and at the lake and we didn’t want furniture that couldn’t stand up to wear and tear”) and although it is a large, handsome home, it isn’t, like some country houses, a showcase for artwork and antiques.
This family-friendly retreat, does, however, have something unique: a furnished tree house, which is a source of pride for daughters Natasha, 10, and Julia, 14, who often sleep in it.
“We started by talking about what kind of plan we wanted,” Julia recalled. “My dad and Natasha drew pictures of what we all envisioned in our heads. After a lot of back and forth, we kind of agreed on a general idea. We even drew up a contract!”
Colin, using his engineering skills, worked out how the tree house would be structured and the kids pitched in, helping to build the roof and staining the floorboards and the ceiling. A mini-suspension bridge links the tree house to the rest of the property.
“It took a really long time to build, but we kind of expected that. Natasha and I knew that if my dad was involved, it wasn’t going to be a ‘normal’ tree house, but a house that just happened to be in a tree!”