Jody

Located on Cox Cove Island On the shoreline of a long sandy tree-framed beach on the pacific west coast of Vancouver Island BC, Canada. Cox Cove Island has a direct south and north rock face, as it points out towards the Pacific Ocean to the west of the beach shoreline. The Beach House site has access to the Pacific Rim Highway which is about 400m to the east of the opposite coasts and lakes of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. My clients are young business professionals with a growing family from Calgary, Alberta, who had purchased a parcel of land on a small island on the pacific west coast of Vancouver Island, BC, Canada. With their kids, this family has envisioned a unique vacation home to grow and to spend their time exploring and surfing Vancouver Island’s beaches every summer. The client’s vision is a sophisticated modern beach house with a modernist architectural style, using basic geometrical shapes, linear lines, and modern environmentally friendly materials, creating a minimal clean look to the structure. The house will have the main living courters on the second level with a loft; the ground floor will contain a double car garage and workshop for the client’s love of creating his custom-made surfboards. The front of the house will have an east door entryway that brings you directly up a spiral staircase to the second and third-floor loft providing three bedrooms and an open concept kitchen and living room with spectacular scenic views of the ocean and Cox Cove beach. The home’s structure will incorporate large curtain wall glass windows facing west will allow natural sunlight throughout the day as the sun travels across the horizon. The house’s southwest corner will meet the most dominant wind flow from the Pacific Ocean, reducing the wind’s energy hitting the structure. It will be built on solid bedrock, so its foundations will be compiled with structural steel beams and cement. Its frame is locally sourced lumber and will not have a basement; it keeps the house’s elevation about 20 feet above sea level to keep the structure protected from the possibility of flooding from the ocean waves. The client has a deep appreciation of the earth’s climate and is sensitive to its structural materials that are locally sourced and recycled. Materials would include the main structure built with epoxy-covered cement walls, locally sourced recycled wood and glazed windows making up the bulk of the materials used on the exterior. The roof slopes to the Northeast to create a flow for precipitation. The interior continues with the modernism beach style with an open and flowing design, using locally sourced recycled wood and an open ceiling plan, from bottom to top.