THE NEW CLASSIC
Standing at the helm of his modest wood-trimmed motorboat, Ian MacDonald navigates the route to his Georgian Bay, Ont., cottage through narrow channels and past barren rocky islands with the offhand calm of intimate familiarity. The ride takes 45 minutes, but even as we pitch and rock in the swells of an open, choppy stretch of water, he never breaks with an easy tour guide’s banter, describing each landmark and highlight.
He steers the boat into a narrow inlet called Go Home Bay, where the 64-year-old Toronto architect has been a regular visitor since he was in his early twenties. He soon turns again, into the small bay at the back of the channel where his own cottage sits on a tall outcrop of Canadian Shield. What strikes you first about the cottage is how it doesn’t strike you at all, how hard it is to even find in the landscape. The surroundings are quintessential Shield country, simple, stark, and breathtaking, all low, rounded rock and wind-bent pines. It looks like a Group of Seven scene, and for good reason—this location was a frequent subject of their work. Several members spent time painting landscapes while staying at one of the area’s first cottages, a simple dwelling, now more than one hundred years old, on an island nearby, and several murals from that cottage are now in the National Gallery.
On our way from the marina, Ian pointed out examples of a recent cottage design trend that he calls the
