Roxboro House: A Family Residence with A Hovering Wood-Clad Volume

Completed in 2007 by Marc Boutin Architectural Collaborative, Roxboro House is a family residence designed for a couple and their two children. This house sits in an inner-city site, an established neighborhood that is well connected to nearby urban amenities in Calgary, AB. The design concept for this project features a simple form: a hovering wood-clad volume.

Design

The clients of this project want to have the capacity of this house to be neighborly and also extroverted, and at times private and introverted. With this context, the design concept features a simple form: a hovering wood-clad volume.

This volume contains all private functions. The public space can be found below this volume, organized around a series of walls. These walls order the site of the house and also extend into the landscape.

Through subtraction, the wood volume of this house is manipulated to create awesome connections to the sky and bring light into the house’s interior via a two-storey dining area. This way also can create an amazing connection between the house social spaces.

Materials

The different qualities of glass, fabric, concrete, and wood are explored. The varied relationships between inside and outside also can be created. Alternately intimately, this also creates a threshold between inside and outside and integrates the house interior with the outside.

With this house, the couple has the ability to adjust the relationship between the house’s exterior and interior space easily.

Roxboro House Gallery

Photographer: Martin Tessler