Five Key Considerations when planning your new home

Location

The perfect home starts with the perfect property. Our Confederation Park house, pictured here, is a perfect example. Only 10 minutes by bike from downtown, it’s set in the heart of a green space that’s extremely rare in an urban environment. Through thoughtful design, we’ve turned it into the city’s most magnificent front yard.

Context

The design of a truly inspired home channels the richness of its environment. Situated at the end of a block adjacent to forested parkland, our Ravine House artfully brings together two very different contextual relationships - a row of historic clapboard homes on one side, and the encroaching forest canopy on the other. The result is a home whose street side is modest and respectful, while its private side embraces the trees through a dramatic three-storey wall of glass.

Rebuild Or Reuse?

Calgary has a tremendous stock of modest, post- war bungalows close to the core. They’re often a wonderful blank canvas upon which to create. If it’s just the two of you, a reworking of the original home may be in order. When you’ve got bigger aspirations though, we’ve got bigger ideas. This home, for instance, was built by carefully removing the original 1970 bungalow, retaining only the main floor joists. Then we built a spectacular new two-storey home upon the existing foundation. Rebuild or reuse? We assess each project individually and help you decide what's best.

Light

How do you wash the deepest spaces of a home with soothing, natural light? It’s an important question when you build in a dense urban environment. For our Parkland Residence, featured in the April 2011 issue of Avenue Magazine and a Finalist in the 2011 AHBA Awards of Excellence, we created a light well above the dining room with glowing globes suspended from a specially-designed floating rail. It's a perfect example of the way we apply creative thought to turn a seemingly intractable problem into an architectural opportunity.

Outdoor Living

Great design shouldn’t stop at the walls of your home. Although at our high latitudes we can only gaze with envy upon the residents of California beach homes, it's still possible to integrate indoor and outdoor living spaces in a way that works with our climate. We designed and built this exquisite rooftop terrace to act as an outdoor living room with dramatic views to an adjacent park. Its southerly exposure and solid perimeter walls create a microclimate that makes the terrace usable well into the spring and fall. Large windows from the adjacent loft overlook the terrace, so the rooftop landscape becomes a defining factor in the character of the interior space. A small fountain refreshes both indoor and outdoor areas during the warm summer days. Don't fight the environment; embrace it.