The Design...

Looking back through my files the house first appears in about 1992, an idle doodle in black felt pen on the back of a Loblaws paper bag (times were tough...). This first effort was followed every year or so - probably after a particularly enjoyable visit to the property - by a few sketches attempting to capture the insight-du-jour. No real progress was made during these years for two reasons. The first was that living on the property while the kids were young would mean endlessly driving the 20 kilometers to Arnprior for lessons, games, forgotten school books and the like. Actually I think we could have managed the driving, but the second reason was that we couldn’t really afford to build a new house - at least not one that would do justice to the site.

A couple of years ago, with two kids at university, the third finishing high school, and the bank lulled into a false sense of security we decided it was time to make our move. We knew from early enquiries that the property fell within the jurisdiction of the Mississippi Valley Conservation Authority, an environmental agency that controls development in the river’s watershed. We soon learned that the swamp adjacent to our site was in fact a “Provincially Significant Wetland” which, when combined with what seemed an arbitrarily high 100 year flood line, meant that the build-able area of our site was in fact quite a bit smaller than we’d thought. Being a glass half full kind of guy I interpreted this as a kind of good news because it meant that the blank canvas I’d been so fearful of was really covered with property lines, flood lines, watersheds and setbacks that in effect relieved the paralysis I was feeling from all that artistic freedom. I remember thinking “right, so this is going to be more of a puzzle than a free-for all, I can handle that”, which I suppose is an admission that I’m more comfortable at the engineering than the fine arts end of the architectural spectrum.

So the design began to take shape. We knew that we wanted ground floor living so that we can hobble around in our old age without having to go upstairs. The kids announced that if we ever wanted to see them again we’d better provide a bedroom for each of them. We thought we’d be smart to have a separate apartment - say above the garage - where guests or our kids, perhaps with future grandkids (Alison’s idea), can stay without us tripping over them. The kitchen had to solve all the problems in our existing one, a pantry would be nice, where are we going to put all of our junk, how about the TV... All of this planning was done of course with an eye to solar access, views, trees and all of the other features of the site we’d come to know so well.

One of the most prominent of these features was rock. We knew from very early days that this house would not have a basement because of the rock poking out all over the site. We knew that any real estate agent our kids would hire after putting us in a home would be upset at the prospect of selling a basement-less house, but frankly that wouldn’t be our problem. Truthfully ever since I witnessed our family albums floating in 12” of water in a former house I had fallen out of love with basements, so the prospect of not having one was fine with me. Basements, however do simplify a lot of things - plumbing, heating and storage being among the most significant - but I’m convinced that with a bit more above-ground space for mechanicals and a commitment to simplify, eliminating the basement can be a good idea.

So this meant a slab-on-grade, and an opportunity to do a radiant floor. A Japanese architect friend of mine took me to a very fine house of his in northern Honshu a few years ago and the thing I remember most - well actually the tea room with the low horizontal window looking out on the perfectly manicured garden was pretty stunning - was the radiant slab with the cork flooring. It was like heaven underfoot and I made a mental note... That’ll be fine for downstairs, but what about upstairs rooms? Suddenly the lack of basement had changed the focus from space planning to mechanical systems, another example that design is anything but a linear process. I guess it’s why architecture is often referred to as an “old man’s profession”, only a long and interesting life can produce the many nuanced relationships you’ll find in a good building... I’m not saying that my life has been nearly long or interesting enough yet but I’m a believer in the adage.

The issue of how to manage the mechanicals in my building and a nagging concern that in spite of my grey hair I might miss something important, put me in mind of an offer I’d received a year or so earlier. One evening while drinking with friends at the Guinea Grille, a favorite spot for the Canadian export housing crowd in London, I happened to mention that I was planning to build a house. Ken Klassen - a well respected expert in the field of energy and environmental design - made a very sincere offer to fly from his home in Winnipeg, at his own expense, to host a Charrette for me. A Charrette is basically a brainstorming session where a group of experts come together to focus on a particular design problem, in my case the optimum mechanical system for my new house. The other equally inebriated and sincere experts in the bar that night chimed in with high fives all round and the seed was firmly planted.

One of the reasons the design of the mechanicals was a bit of a puzzle was that I was planning all along to build a very energy efficient house - one that almost certainly wouldn’t need an elaborate and expensive system. That I was going to build a really top notch low energy house was really not a question given that this is what I do for a living. At DAC we’ve been preaching the gospel of energy conservation for over 20 years, in fact I joined the company in 1988 because of its reputation in the field. However my relatively modest budget meant I couldn’t get too carried away. I think it’s healthy - in a professional sense - to spend your own money doing what you tell your clients to do. In my case the patter has always been “build a really good building envelope because it will pay long-term energy, comfort and durability dividends, and because it is too expensive to upgrade later”. With energy prices escalating wildly these days this maxim seems more true now than ever. So highly insulated walls, roof and floor were a given, plus triple-glazed windows, good solar access, plenty of thermal mass, extreme air-tightness... all the things that a good building envelope should have, with the hope that I could steal enough money from the mechanical budget to pay for it.

The Charrette idea languished for a while as I got busy resolving the planning and architectural aspects of the house. I really wanted to present my colleagues with a fait accompli on the building design and keep them focussed on the mechanicals - having them critique the architecture might be more than I could handle.

The Property

The Client

In the Beginning...

I designed the Snye House for my family on a site we’ve owned for over 18 years. I’m in the business of designing and building energy efficient houses for others but it took the full 18 years to muster the nerve and the confidence of the bank to proceed with a project of my own. Eighteen years ago my wife Alison was visiting friends on a gravel cul-de-sac in an area west of Ottawa where the Mississippi River (not that one, the one that meanders through eastern Ontario) meets the Ottawa. “There’s a piece of property for sale you should really have a look at” was the report I got that evening, beginning a chain of events that eventually led to the purchase of a two acre site at the end of the road perched on the edge of the “Snye”.

Somewhere in Google I learned that “Snye” is a 100% Canadian word with a root that can be found in Egyptian hieroglyphics and is “certainly 6000 years old, probably much older.” I found it a bit strange to see “Canadian” and “Egyptian hieroglyphics” in the same sentence... but it goes on to say that “a snye is a side-water channel that rejoins a larger river, creating an island, and sometimes conveniently providing canoeists passage around turbulent rapids or around a waterfall” - now we’re getting somewhere because that is precisely what this snye does. It circumvents the rapids at Fitzroy Harbour that gave rise in the 1930’s to a large hydro power station on the Ottawa River. To ensure that most of the Mississippi flow entered the head pond of the hydro dam the same folks who built the power station constructed a flow-control weir at the head of the Snye. It was this weir with the water burbling through and the long stretch of waterfront it created that gave this property a unique sense of “place” and motivated us, penniless as we were, to figure out a way to buy it.

Over the years we used the “property”, as it was referred to in our household, as a place to fish, camp, cross-country ski, swim and generally reconnect to the natural world. Each Christmas we would clear the ice (until global warming pushed the ice past Christmas and into the new year...) and play hockey, eat short-breads and drink tea in front of a shoreline fire. We waited out the predicted “end-times” of Y2K at the property, basking in the glow of the fire and casually wondering what files if any we might have access to in the morning.

















All the while over these eighteen years we were getting to know the place - the seasons, the trees, the little enclaves of unique plants and all the other idiosyncrasies of the site that would eventually influence the design and siting of the house.