Old at heart
It was a fresh, early fall day when Barry Sampson and Judi Coburn arrived at Beech Lake in Haliburton, Ont., to find their cottage hoisted 11 feet in the air.
A simple faux-log structure, the one-and-a-half-storey building was perched high on four stacked wooden cribs, looking a bit like a dignified older lady who’s lifted up her skirt and found herself revealing bare legs underneath. “I actually felt sorry for the building,” Judi, a novelist and retired teacher, says with a laugh. “It seemed humiliated with its underside exposed.”
Barry saw it a bit differently. “I had a sense of the old cottage up there like a sentry, seeing views it had never seen before,” he recalls. A retired University of Toronto architecture professor and a principal architect at Baird Sampson Neuert Architects—a firm perhaps best known for its work on the Niagara Parks Butterfly Conservatory and the French River Provincial Park Visitor Centre—Barry had been planning and thinking about the project for years by then.
The cottage was hand-built by his father not long after the end of the Second World War, but by the early 2000s, it needed a new foundation and a new roof. A long-time advocate for sustainable design, Barry wasn’t interested in knocking it down, throwing it in landfill, and starting again, as many of their neighbours on the lake had done. Instead, he and Judi decided that they’d reimagine the old place along modernist lines, with an entirely new ground-level space beneath the old building and a vaulted loft above.
