Building on history in Nova Scotia
A 400-year-old village served as design plan for three-part art piece
Smith House reflects a private yet connected community,
It takes a village, built with thoughtful planning, to raise a community.
That’s what Canadian architect Brian MacKay-Lyons is nurturing at his farm community, Shobac, in Upper Kingsburg, on the South Shore of Nova Scotia.
“All the dwellings at Shobac are private yet connected — they are a village in the truest sense of the word, built on the historic site of an old fishing village,” said MacKay-Lyons of the area where French explorer Samuel de Champlain landed in 1604 and which is surrounded by ruins from that era.
“This is the way we always used to live: together. It’s a timeless and universal human need, and this (pandemic) crisis is making us rediscover that essence.”
One of the newest projects is Smith House, built for art collector owners — “and they saw this as an art piece” — on two acres.
It is comprised of three different buildings that include more than 2,500 sq. ft. — a shed, a night building and a day pavilion that provides the residents a 360-degree view of surrounding land and sea.
The pavilion houses the living, kitchen and dining areas, with a granite wine cellar below. Competing with nature’s beauty are a 28-foot dining table with an inverted live edge and 16-foot, show-stopping granite fireplace with a five-ton mantle stone.
The night building is a cavelike refuge with one bedroom that the architects liken to a sunken wooden vessel. It also has a skylit dressing room and a white marble bathroom. The shed building has a loft sleeping area and a wood-burning fireplace.
Smith House uses tripleglazed windows and has high thermal mass with heating in its stone and concrete floors. Completed in 2019, it took three years to design and build.
We asked architect Brian MacKay-Lyons, of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects in Halifax, N.S., a few questions about Smith House.
What inspired the design?
It’s part of Shobac, our village we’re making here. It was historically a fishing port, so the houses are arranged like they might be in a fishing village, all staggered with courtyards between them.
There was a real artistic freedom, right down to the furniture. The owners said, “OK, we like the Corten (weathered, rusted steel), we like the granite
ruin, let’s put it together.” I did a sketch, they signed off on it, that was it — all in one morning.
Your design includes the whole village. How did you approach that?
They’re microclimates. It teaches you about the weather. Where do you go and have coffee in the morning in a sheltered outdoor court? Or where do you have a glass of wine in the evening and watch the sun set in a sheltered court? Wind sheltering, sun-catching courtyards between the buildings, and also trying to make sure there’s privacy between this house and the next house to it: that kind of village-making game is about the landscape, community, privacy and climate.
What about that five-ton
fireplace stone?
I just called the woman who owned the quarry and asked, “What’s the biggest stone you’ve got?” She sent me a picture of a stone much bigger than her car and I said, “We’ll take it.” It was taken out, with a crane, through the roof of the building.
Did you design the dining room table?
Yes, we designed all the furnishings ... the wood of all three of the tables is from one tree that came from Austria. We made an inverted live-edge table ... instead of a live edge on the outside, there’s a kind of fissure down the centre of the table.
Why is Smith House three parts?
When you have a couple of
buildings, you can arrange them to catch the sun and block the wind. The fishing village that used to be on this site was composed of small fishing shacks, so we wanted to break the scale of the house down into sizes that would be more in scale with the old fishing village.
How will COVID-19 shape your designs in the future?
Our goal has always been to connect interiors to outer landscapes, creating a sense of prospect and refuge.
We have always needed this in our dwellings, but it’s especially true now.
But also, we need a sense of community, that basic human comfort. That was a guiding principle in our design of Smith House, which is an integral part of the Shobac village.