Cloister House

This three-storey residence with garage and laneway house has touches of character at every turn – its design is fun, functional and built with family in mind; shared between a grandmother and her grandchildren. The hilltop site offers views of British Columbia’s spectacular mountains and ocean, balanced with shorter internally-focused ones to an intimate pocket garden.

The overall feeling of the home is that it’s incredibly cozy, a quiet place of solitude in the busy city. Its whimsical and child-friendly elements are endearing – love personified as architecture.

Materials commonly perceived as cold were manipulated to achieve textural warmth – hand-worked masonry, charred fir planks to form the concrete walls and blackened steel.

Fast + Epp’s structural design featured exposed composite glulam and concrete decking, as well as cast-in-place insulated concrete walls. A finely-crafted spine wall anchors its layout from front to rear. At the interior of the main house, a custom-engineered staircase at each level features steps on one side and a steel slide on the other – it will be well-used, no doubt, by its young residents.