Positioned within the small group of Higher Kingsburg, Nova Scotia, this modest home by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects epitomises the agency’s delicate strategy to residential design. With two bedrooms and measuring 1,050 sq. toes, Skybox isn’t any sprawling modernist McMansion, neither is it an ersatz pastiche of the native vernacular.
(Picture credit score: Matthew MacKay-Lyons and Christina Brock)
Uncover the fun of this modest home in Nova Scotia
As an alternative, Brian MacKay-Lyons, Talbot Sweetapple and their workforce have chosen to return to fundamentals, trying on the qualities and traits of native fishing shacks and translating these right into a residential archetype that’s attuned to the native atmosphere. The home sits on a slender metal construction that elevates it above the sloping website, with an entrance deck set again from the street.
The staircase leads up from the bedrooms to the dwelling space
(Picture credit score: Matthew MacKay-Lyons and Christina Brock)
On the doorway stage there are two bedrooms and a rest room, with a straight stair that leads as much as the kitchen, eating and dwelling house on the higher flooring. Right here the amount has been expanded up into the picket eaves, making a typical ‘nice room’ with an uninterrupted run of home windows trying north. One other strip of fenestration serves as a backdrop to the linear kitchen island, with south-easterly views throughout close by Romkey Pond with Hartling Bay past.
The nice room on the prime of the home
(Picture credit score: Matthew MacKay-Lyons and Christina Brock)
Roof joists are uncovered, as are the metal ties, and the heat of the timber is paired with two hefty granite slabs, one on the west façade serving because the encompass to the fireside and wood-burner, the opposite the backdrop to the eating banquette. The surprising heat and patina of those slabs add one other layer of pure texture to the inside.
The kitchen counter with a view
(Picture credit score: Matthew MacKay-Lyons and Christina Brock)
A granite lab serves as a backdrop to the fireside
(Picture credit score: Matthew MacKay-Lyons and Christina Brock)
(Picture credit score: Matthew MacKay-Lyons and Christina Brock)
Outdoors, Skybox is clad in purposeful corrugated metallic, a sensible, low-cost response to the area’s local weather. On the bed room stage, the one home windows look west throughout the valley, with the elevated construction creating privateness in addition to views. Above these home windows, the flue from the wood-burner provides a putting piece of purposeful high-tech detailing that enhances the verticality of this façade.
The home is raised up above the panorama
(Picture credit score: Matthew MacKay-Lyons and Christina Brock)
The architects describe the venture as a part of their ‘ongoing analysis on ‘village-making’, exploring all aspects of residential design because it pertains to present panorama and surrounding communities. ‘As a part of the village street, this home aspires to be a great neighbour by siting, scale, and form,’ they write, including that ‘generally essentially the most modest dwelling, by its distillation and readability, can develop into a prototype for elaboration, variation, and aggregation.’
(Picture credit score: Matthew MacKay-Lyons and Christina Brock)
MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects are a well-established and extremely acclaimed Nova Scotian agency with a worldwide popularity. Primarily based in Halifax and Lunenburg, with fields places of work in Colorado and Massachusetts, the agency has acquired over 170 awards since its inception in 1985. MacKay-Lyons and Sweetapple work alongside two different Principals, Melanie Hayne and Shane Andrews. The venture lead on Skybox was Isaac Fresia.
(Picture credit score: Matthew MacKay-Lyons and Christina Brock)
The home epitomises the studio’s breadth of expertise and fixed seek for innovation. In addition to grand personal residences, residence buildings, academic and company work, Skybox affords an inexpensive path to putting rural design. Because the architects be aware, ‘what begins as an easy, unembellished type could evolve as an adaptable framework for architectural language.’
