Huge, heritage trusses inspire $5M home
Old wooden beams and posts lend a ‘love-worn’ feel in Ganaraska,
Irka Dyczok looked at the six massive building trusses lying in a field and saw her future home.
“We just fell in love with them,” she recalled of the beams from an early-1900s foundry that she and partner Paul Cockburn saw at a reclaimed timber depot in Markdale, Ont., near Georgian Bay, in 2008.
Toronto residents at the time, the couple planned to build a new home on their 46 acres of private Ganaraska Forest midway between Port Hope and Peterborough. The trusses, first spotted by their architect Lawrence Combe, provided the inspiration for a contemporary design juxtaposed “with a loveworn, lived-in feel,” said Dyczok, a commercial interior designer.
“In two days, Lawrence and I had (the house) designed,” she said of the collaboration with Combe of MMMC Architects.
Those 30-foot trusses — along with posts, planks and purlins reclaimed from other buildings of a similar vintage — now pull the eye upwards to the exposed ceiling of the $5-million singlelevel house.
“The bottom beam is old growth Douglas fir, nine inches by 15 inches. You just can’t get wood like that anymore,” said Dyczok, founder of Designfarm Inc.
Mighty free-standing posts bolted to the concrete floor along the 80-foot length of the open-plan house help support the structure, which was completed in 2010.
With natural light flooding in through multiple skylights and eight-by-eight-foot windows, the overall effect is “jaw-dropping,” according to listing agent Rizwan Malik of Sotheby’s International Realty Canada.
It’s also totally unexpected as you approach the “unassuming” grey steel-clad house tucked among the trees, he said.
“What’s super unique about this home is where it’s situated … pretty much 50 acres of private forest that’s all yours. It’s just breathtaking.”
The property is 75 minutes
northeast of downtown Toronto and 10 minutes south of the village of Millbrook.
Dyczok explains that she and Cockburn tried to build their home “mindfully.”
“We wanted to tread lightly and become stewards of the forest.”
The low-maintenance building has geothermal heating, windows and skylights that open for air circulation and “phenomenal views wherever you are in the house,” she said. (Malik describes each of the “super large” tripled-paned openings as having its own postcard view.)
With endless stars visible through the skylights and LED lights on the beams, “the whole place transforms at nighttime,” said Dyczok. “It becomes very sexy.”
By day, it’s a study in contrasts between the “strength and stability” of the giant timbers and the peaceful, Zen-like atmosphere, she added.
The long stretches of walls provide gallery space for artwork, much of it Canadian or a reflection of her Ukrainian heritage, said the designer who works out of a spacious studio/ office at the front of the house.
The residence, which she describes as “a private oasis (offering) the best of urban life in a forest,” has been the site of “amazing” parties with more than 100 guests.
“The open space allows people to celebrate and just be,” Dyczok said of pre-pandemic entertaining.
Outside, wildlife is abundant around the pond, hills and trails where she forages for mushrooms and keeps fit walking with the couple’s two Chesapeake Bay retrievers. (The dogs even have their own post-walk indoor shower facilities.)
“We’re living our best life out here,” said Dyczok, who said she’s “bittersweet” about leaving to start a new chapter.