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.