Living in a library on the B.C. coast
Booklovers House has a wall that speaks volumes,
As the Canadian seasons go ’round, so do the books in this house.
Built for owners of a bookstore, the owners also love to collect and read books. So what better way to enjoy your best friends than to surrounded yourself with them?
Booklovers’ House is built in an oval shape on remote Sidney Island, in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, between Vancouver Island and the San Juan Islands.
The site is isolated, with no access to ferries or local services.
And the home’s design, which encircles a garden and covers 2,700 square feet, is meant to ensure privacy, protect from feral deer, and, of course, house the family’s many books.
As you enter the home from the garden, you’re greeted by the living, dining and kitchen area with a stunning circular bookshelf that creates a hallway. On one side of the home, there’s a master bedroom with ensuite, plus an office area; on the other side, two bedrooms and a bathroom.
An upper roof curves towards the sun, while lower flat roofs provide an ideal space for solar panels and high clerestory windows that maximize natural light flow into the home as well as providing natural ventilation.
Building materials include Douglas fir and red cedar. Booklovers’ House also has solar panels, battery-powered clerestory windows on the south side, of the home and lower windows on the north side to create a flow of air.
Booklovers’ House took four years to design and build and was completed in 2008.
We asked designer Kim Smith, with Blue Sky Architecture Inc., about the West Coast home:
What were the challenges in building the home?
It’s a remote site so everything had to be put on a barge and the builder had to time the landing over the tides. Sometimes he was delivering materials at 2 a.m., because that’s when the tide was high. Then everything had to be off-loaded and taken to the site. All of the exterior structure — the colonnade — was made from trees taken down on the site and milled. There were pretty big storms getting to the sites sometimes ... it could be very exciting!
Since the home’s theme is books, did you start with the bookshelves?
No. We started with the site and worked with the clients’ interests. It has a fairly strong formality of an oval-shaped courtyard with a trellis colonnade around it. There was the view which was north facing, but because it was off-grid, we needed both a sheltered area which was south-facing — the courtyard — and also an area elevated enough on which to mount solar panels. The idea of using the bookshelves integrated into the structure as we were designing it.
Was it difficult to design with all of the curves?
We don’t usually have geometry as a rigid design frame. We work more with curves but in a more organic sense. There’s a real complexity to creating an oval — it’s not like a circle. One of the things that freed up our architecture and architecture in the 1990s was 3-D CAD programs.
Using it, you can much more easily describe how to build buildings in multiple different dimensions of form. Will COVID-19 influence your approach to architecture in the future?
I hope the experience of the pandemic will help us rethink how we’re building our cities. Density in urban centres can create livable communities — or not. The rush for taller towers, with smaller living spaces disconnected from the ground plane, the natural environment and therefore community, is more starkly revealed in a lockdown situation. I think density can be achieved with models like Paris, Berlin and London, on a five- to six-storey scale. I’m hopeful the pandemic will reveal to us, individually and on a community scale, what we essentially value — a community where everyone is housed in a way that connects us to the environment and to each other.