Shor House by Measured Architecture

Thoughtfully salvaging the materials and history of its island site, this dynamic family home beautifully interweaves shared and personal narratives with sustainable, contemporary design.

Reconceiving a historical site without neglecting its lineage can often be met with challenges and shortcomings. Yet, for Shor House, Measured Architecture embed the rich history of Mayne Island in British Columbia in almost every way possible.

Nestled alongside the clear, tranquil waters of the southern Gulf Islands, Shor House is a quick retreat from Vancouver.

Shor House is the family retreat of Measured Architecture’s founding principal, Clinton Cuddington, and is where he and his wife, Monica Berdin, and their two children come to relax. Cuddington worked in conjunction with Berdin, who is trained as a jeweller and an interior designer, to create a legacy home that reflects a synergy of both their attitudes. “Featuring three buildings, it is effectively a glorified barn,” says Cuddington. “At the water edge is our primary dwelling, the second building is a studio that my wife uses for her creative practice and the third building is a guest cabin.” The brief also called for a completely carbon-neutral building, constructed with a mandate to minimise disruption to the island’s natural state.

Nestled alongside the clear, tranquil waters of the southern Gulf Islands, Shor House is a quick retreat from Vancouver. “The location is at the heart of some of the success of this project,” says Cuddington. As the existing building was already eloquently connected to its pristine location, Measured Architecture approached the project as a renovation, with many elements left unchanged and new additions focusing on weaving the building back into the surrounding wilderness. “The previous occupants were a fishing family, so the wonderful thing about that is that we already had critical landscape around the building behaving to the view because it had been trained over time,” says Cuddington. “We preserved the stacked stone walls and unbuilt, rather than demolished, the existing home and barn, systematically pulling those buildings down so we could inventory the pieces and reconstitute them in the new building.” Few modifications were made to the siting, with the main change the shifting of the building’s height to allow for vistas across the Navy Channel.

Mirroring how Tongu imbued Japanese influences through landscaping and stone, perhaps the most profound facet is the countless ways materiality links back to the site’s heritage as the palette is largely informed by the repopulation of existing materials.

Stepping inside the main residence, one is met with a classic entry sequence that expands to a two-storey cathedral window view that overlooks the waterway, making the space feel vast and almost gallery-like. “In a nutshell, the goal is that you flow into something that is triumphal with its views but very informal and inviting in its layout,” says Cuddington. The primary level has a combined kitchen, dining, living room and wood-burning fireplace, a basement with two additional bedrooms and a movie room, and the top floor includes two bedrooms and an ensuite. The studio looks out sideways to the landscape and the guesthouse. While compact, it features a kitchen, bedroom, laundry, secondary flex space and a ladder up to another sleeping quarters.

Cuddington wanted to play with the existing stacked stone walls, sandstone and rock on the site, so he rallied a series of trusted makers, including friend and master stonemason Tamotsu Tongu from Osaka. “I explained to him that the property was part of a larger site for Japanese families that had been removed after Pearl Harbour and were interned here during the 1940s,” says Cuddington. “He took this as his sign to commit to the project, with the caveat that one of his closest friends also works on the project, because his friend’s mother was a child on this site.”

It is the transformation of wood from the island into the existing house and barn that has had the most poignant effect in this reimagining of Shor House.

Mirroring how Tongu imbued Japanese influences through landscaping and stone, perhaps the most profound facet is the countless ways materiality links back to the site’s heritage as the palette is largely informed by the repopulation of existing materials. A robust exoskeleton features Corten steel, plate steel and Schüco German windows. “As a contemporary architect, I typically don’t work with a palette that is as dark and patinated as this, but I went there, and it was a cathartic moment for me,” says Cuddington. The interior is simple, inspired by sculptor Donald Judd’s Marfa compound in a converted Texas air station. A rich palette features galvanised miscellaneous metal, local black Carmanah marble, polished concrete flooring and Venetian plastering in white, grey and black with a Moroccan wax finish. The exterior cladding that lines many interior walls was painted white to reflect light. “The goal was that when you came in from that austerity on the outside, that it was like cracking a geode, where the crystals are on the inside.”

It is the transformation of wood from the island into the existing house and barn that has had the most poignant effect in this reimagining of Shor House. Repurposed oak floors are left unsanded, striking a balance between the distilled detailing of contemporary design and the cabin aesthetic. Recycled yellow cedar rail ties found from the dismantled Englewood Railroad on Northern Vancouver Island are milled to use for the deck, while timber sourced from nearby former farms is used in exposed nail-laminated timber flooring and the feature staircase. The only new wood in the house is charred with a shou sugi ban treatment, once again imprinting the Japanese history of the site. Cuddington recalls the beauty in “the rigour of harvesting materials for the project and the beauty in using those materials without it resulting in a compromise.” A study in restraint and adaptive reuse, Shor House offers a powerful example of how to celebrate prior habitation as a new custodian – rebuilding without erasing the history of the land and people before.

Architecture by Measured Architecture. Interior design by Measured Architecture and Monica Berdin. Build by Powers Construction. Landscape design by Measured Architecture, Tamotsu Tongu and Aloe Designs.