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	Photos © Mike Awad ARCH+PHOTO

Toronto is basically a pretty flat place. But if you drive a little more than an hour north, you find the Mulmur Hills, a band of rolling hills that has recently become popular with Toronto suburbanites. The building sites are large and secluded, and the site of Ian MacDonald's design for the House in Mulmur Hills had a particular wealth of geographical diversity.

"The site condition was fairly complex: cedar bog, deciduous forest, reforested pine," MacDonald said. "You approach the house on a road that has a couple of switchbacks, and when you got to the top, you aren't even sure which way is north."

MacDonald won the commission through a sort of private competition run by the clients, who had very specific ideas about the direction the architecture would take, at least at that early point in the process.

"The clients said that the house would go on the drumlin that existed on the site, but I tried to convince them to place the house down near the pond, and then they could go for a walk up on the drumlin if they wanted to enjoy the view. But they said, 'if you want to be considered for this position, the house is going right here.'"

The placement of the house eventually led to much of the architecture of the final design. The house is entered from a mudroom, where the only view is of the surrounding forest, but as visitors enter the main part of the house, they become aware of the vistas beyond. "This house," MacDonald said, "is about control of the landscape."

The main views of the house are to the North-Northeast, which makes for wonderful viewing, but not for a lot of light in the interior. So MacDonald added a roof monitor up on top of the house, a clerestory that allows light into the rooms from due south without adding windows to the south wall, a move which would have diluted the effect of the main windows.

Despite his clients' early insistence on certain ideas, MacDonald was very happy with the way the project progressed.

"Getting people to adopt pursuing an architectural idea into form is an interesting process," MacDonald said. "At a certain point, the clients looked at us with a furrowed brow, which I used to interpret as criticism. But I realized that they just don't always understand the ideas that we're talking about, even though we had done drawings and lots of models.

"A good project takes off in a direction where the client may not be entirely comfortable," he said, "and most clients seize up when they can't understand an idea completely. Most people won't take that leap of faith, to say, OK, I can't visualize this, but I trust your work and I see you have a track record of accomplishing the things you say you're trying to accomplish, so let's do it. And that's very important for maintaining your independence as an architect."

Not only was MacDonald happy with the result, but so were his clients. About a year after moving into the house, they sent him a letter.

"When you were doing this project," they wrote, "there came a point where we couldn't really understand what was going to be built. But we went on faith, and we're rewarded every time we walk into the house."

Kevin Lerner

Gross square footage:
2,700 sq. ft.

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