Mountain Retreat by OPAL Architecture Overlooks Canadian Lake

The Mountain Retreat residence presented a unique architectural opportunity given the remote and private site, overlooking a serene lake and rugged hills beyond. The layout of the building in the landscape resulted from the intent to create a series of private family spaces each with a unique visual connection to the surrounding site, while providing privacy for those spaces from the site access and adjacent interior spaces. To ensure privacy, the program elements are arranged in a pinwheel form, radiating from a central corridor, which also serves as the main entry of the house.

The corridor is fully glazed to maximize views to the outdoors, providing fully climatized circulation between the smaller peaked wooden volumes, in which the family spaces are housed. The goal for the architectural form language was to create a series of well-proportioned gable volumes that allow the building’s massing to break-down in terms of its scale and magnitude and integrate into the surrounding natural environment.

To help ensure that the home is energy-efficient, comfortable and healthy to occupy, the shell and mechanical systems were designed based on the Passive House principals. The building shell construction includes an airtight, highly insulated foundation, wall and roof assembly that successfully passed a blower-door-test. Ultra-high-performance windows and doors were specified and located where they collect maximum heat from the sun. For the mechanical equipment, high-efficiency heating and cooling systems were installed, including a heat-recovery ventilation system that delivers a constant flow of fresh air while capturing 80 percent of the heat from the air it exhausts to the outdoors. Combined, this results in a building that uses approximately 20 percent of the energy consumed by a conventional code-compliant house, while providing a healthier, more comfortable living environment.

The core of the Mountain Retreat construction system is an innovative all-wood panel made from cross-laminated timber (CLT), which was manufactured in Quebec by Nordic Structures. CLT is an engineered wood product consisting of sawn planks bonded in alternating-direction layers to form structural panels that can be quickly assembled—in house-of-cards fashion—into a solid-wood building shell. The benefit of this construction system is that the wood panels are carbon storing, extremely durable, and also create a delightful interior environment through the exposed wood interior finish of the CLT.