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Martin Mack, owner of Concord Homes in Kingston, Ont., describes his custom build on the shores of Lake Ontario.
This is in a very established estate neighborhood that’s on Lake Ontario. There was a house there originally this neighborhood. We’ve done six tear-downs, so, tear the house down and then rebuild something new for somebody on the water. And that was the case here. We took the old house out. It was an old bungalow. It was small and the lot was extremely heavily treed. The house had quite a steep driveway. Quite a few times the previous owner had driven into the garage door, it was so steep. So when we built the new house, we were able to elevate the house on the lot and then we also had to do a lot of tree removal because that house was there for at least 60 years. So there was a lot of mature trees that had to be cleared out. We got a little closer to the water because we had to move it back from the road to be able to get it elevated so we didn’t have such a steep driveway.
The owners sat with us to work through the design. They definitely had a had a dark theme in mind. They wanted to try to hit that transitional architectural style. But still they wanted the wood elements to make it feel like it was on the water. A little cottagey. The wood accents were a little bit of a collaboration between us and the client. The client wanted that look that it still felt like a cottage, so we needed to add some wood, but you also needed to add the wood to really tone down a lot of that black and add that organic feature that we needed to tie the black all together. We just used pine, everything was pine straight up. And then we gave it a Danish oil. We didn’t want to varnish it, because when you varnish it sometimes turns kind of orangey on you, right? So it’s just oiled. And is it going to need maintenance and reapplication.
The brick is Charcoal Vivace. It’s a brick by Brampton. The stone is Midnight Granada, which is also by Brampton brick. We tried to nail the stone on the bottom – it’s a full bed masonry product. All the siding on the right side in the great room, that’s a Hardie product, a cement board, James Hardie cement board. And then on the left side would also be the James Hardie cement board so you’ve got the board and batten and then you’ve got a mix to make it more look a little more modern on the left side. Just being on the water and it being south-facing they wanted as minimal maintenance as possible and the Hardie allowed us to still make it look like wood but not have the continual maintenance.
We did triple-pane windows on the south side but we didn’t do it on the other sides. We always build two-by-six R24 batts. And then we do the one-inch foam on the outside to stop the thermal bridging. But we also do OSB, so it’s got OSB one-inch foam. And then we strap it for the airspace with the Hardie.
The front door is also from Ostaco. It’s a stain, and the stain is barley. So Ostaco gets all their components from ThermaTru. Fibreglass stained products. The garage doors would be from Garaga, which would be a California in the black with the sandblasted windows.
We tried to take advantage of the view with large, expansive windows you want. Having gotten rid of a 60 – 70-year-old house – the views they didn’t use back then. They never took advantage of the waterfront. So they wanted that for their main living space looking south on Lake Ontario. That natural light. They wanted as much light as they could and also the lot is very steep, so it was it was great that we could take advantage of the steep lot so they had a proper walk-out.
We are a distributor and a supplier of Ostaco windows, which is out of the Toronto area. In order not to compromise the views on some of those larger windows we put the smaller operable part on the bottom so when you’re sitting down you actually get a good view through the top part of the window.
You come out of the great room and you’ve got this deck here with the great view. They really wanted a huge deck to just sit and entertain and look at the water.
We had to turn the garage so it wasn’t so steep. You had a little bit of an approach pad to get to your garage. But also, by putting the garage that way, we’re not compromising any of the rear views. So all the living space along the back is all views. We’re not chewing up garage base at the back of the house. So turning that, making the L shape, just the whole house takes advantage of views of lake. Otherwise you would have lost a chunk of it to have garage sitting there, which nobody likes. You just needed to break that [the side wall of the garage] up a little bit. It’s it was just too much, too plain. So we kind of added the awning on as an extra feature just to draw your eye to when you look at the house.