La Cornette by YH2 Architects in Cleveland, Québec

YH2 built this house on the slope of a small hill in Cleveland, Québec. This project won jury’s 1st prize, “single-family residential buildings” category, 2011 Awards of Excellence in Architecture, Ordre des architectes du Québec.

La Cornett's South view

• Architects: Yiacouvakis Hamelin, Architectes
• Site: Township of Cleveland, Québec
• Area: 3,000 square feet
• Year of construction: 2008 / 2009 / 2010
• yh2 design team: Marie-Claude Hamelin, Loukas Yiacouvakis
• Project manager: yh2
• Builder: Emmanuel Yiacouvakis
• Article source: v2com.biz

The house striated with bands of horizontal windows, giant louvers

La Cornette is a country house open to the pastoral landscape that surrounds it. Under a soaring roof resembling a nun’s cornet wimple is a roomy dwelling modelled on traditional Quebec houses of old that lodged large families and their relatives. This house for celebrations and holidays, designed for two families, is set into the naturally uneven terrain in a way that brings each level into direct contact with the surrounding natural environment. It offers a resting place for all guests under its large gable in a series of bedrooms and unusual sleeping areas.

Level 1, entrance

An out-scaled structure, like the agricultural buildings that surround it, the house is both traditional in its morphology and innovative in its use of materials. Shingled with raw fibre-cement panels on the walls and roof, it is a house beyond the domestic scale, simple and rot-proof, capable of standing the test of time. The house is striated with bands of horizontal windows, giant louvers that cut the sun at its most powerful, with new points of view at each level. It is protected by its wimple from the hot summer sun and inundated with light in the winter, needing neither air-conditioning nor heating on sunny days.

Level 2, refectory table of the dining room

The interior is in wood, painted or natural, in planks or panels, composed almost exclusively of made-to-measure furniture pieces:

• from the refectory table for meals to the day table with hideaway television set;
• from the large wraparound couch in the living room to the stainless-steel kitchen island;
• from the balustrade bookshelf along the stairway to the wall night-lights made of aluminum panels with cut-outs of fireflies, fish, and frogs;
• from wall-to-wall beds where people sleep foot-to-foot to overhanging bunk beds floating in the landscape

It is a playground for architects, children, and adults, a vacation colony lost in the countryside.

Level 2, view from the dining room

Level 2, balustrade bookshelf along the stairway

Level 2, general view

Level 2, wall night-lights made of aluminum panels with cut-outs of fish

Level 2, the large wraparound couch in the living room

Level 2, fire place of the living room

Level 2, the day table with hideaway television set

Level 3, the horizontal windows, giant louvers that cut the sun at its most powerful, with new points of view at each level

Level 3, platform above the stair

Level 3, central area

Level 3, bedroom, detail of the ladder

Level 3, view toward the bedroom

Level 3, the wall-to-wall bed where people sleep foot-to-foot

Level 3, north dormitory

Level 3, bathroom

Level 3, South dormitory, the overhanging bunk beds floating in the landscape

Level 3, South dormitory, detail

South view

Exterior detail

Night view

The Architects

Tags: Canada, Cleveland, Québec

Category: House

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