Jingle Pot Longhouse · kitchenS 19° W10:20
One run, no wall cupboards
Seven metres of fir and a single stone shelf. The owners cook for fourteen at Christmas and the island was set out from the chair positions, not the appliances.
Architecture + interiors · Nanaimo, British Columbia
Rooms at the hour
Three of us. Eleven finished houses since 2016. We photograph every room at the hour its light is best, because that is the hour you will want to be standing in it.
Hammond Bay House · livingN 72° E16:40
What we actually do
We will not draw you a house you cannot build.
Every project starts with a feasibility note — $4,200, two weeks, and a number at the end of it that is within 12% of the final tender. If the number does not work we say so then, before anyone has paid for a set of drawings.
We take six jobs a year. Four are whole houses, two are interiors inside somebody else's walls. We do not do renders, we do not do competitions, and we will not run a build we have not drawn.
The eight we have finished →
One house, four hours
Protection Island Cabin, from first light to the last of it
Protection Island Cabin · stairN 4° Wall day
148 m² on a lot the ferry company said could not be built on. Board-marked concrete core, cedar rainscreen, two bedrooms and a bunk landing. Finished March 2024, eight weeks late, entirely because of the ferry. The stair is the only piece of structure you can see from every room in the house.
- 07:12
The stair takes the first of it
The concrete was poured against rough-sawn fir boards so it holds the grain. For twenty minutes in the morning the east slot throws the board lines back onto the wall opposite.
- 11:05
The kitchen stops being a corridor
We moved the island 340mm north of where the client wanted it so that two people can pass behind a third who is cooking. It cost nothing and it is the thing they mention.
- 14:30
Too much sun, so we built a lid
The first scheme cooked. A 900mm cedar brow over the west glazing drops the afternoon gain by roughly a third and takes the glare off the floor without darkening the room in January.
- 18:40
The hour the house is for
Everything else on this site was planned around this twenty minutes. Build cost was $684,000 over fourteen months, and the ferry schedule added eleven working days to the programme.
Three rooms we would build again
Filed by room, bearing and hour
Room the plate was taken inWhich way the glass facesWhen the shutter went
Pipers Lagoon Rooms · galleryW15:08
We left it empty for a year
The clients moved in with four chairs and lived with the light before buying anything. We photograph this room every season; it has not needed a single thing added.
Hammond Bay House · courtN 72° E16:40
The court earns its square metres
Giving up 28m² of floor to an open court bought daylight on three sides of the plan and removed two rooflights we could not have afforded to detail properly.
Every band on this site holds a room and the hand that made it
The shelf is one piece of big-leaf maple from a windfall on Cedar Road, 58mm thick, housed 14mm into the plaster. It took the joiner three days and cost $1,900. It is the only thing in the room that is not painted.
How a detail gets priced →
“They came back in February to photograph the same room and showed us the two pictures side by side. That is when we understood what we had paid for.”
Rhona Whitcroft · Pipers Lagoon Rooms · owner since 2022
- Finished houses
- 11
- Average build
- 14 months
- Tender vs estimate
- ±12%
Departure Bay Walk-Up · linkN 30° W18:40
Bring us the lot, and the hour you want to sit in it.
Start a drawing →