At the two-building B2 Lofts in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, architect Brian MacKay-Lyons doesn’t mind that people sometimes can’t tell which building is old and which is new. Never mind the fact that one was completed in 1873 and one in 2020. After all, this is one of only two towns in North America to be named a UNESCO World Heritage site, thanks to its 19th-century British colonial buildings.

“I love that,” says MacKay-Lyons, founder of Mackay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects. “Everything’s been done, and you can learn from it. Lunenburg in particular was a shipbuilding place. There’s this great craft tradition. It would be silly not to use it and allow your clients to benefit from it.”

Yet upon closer inspection, the newer of the two structures is a playful fusion of traditional and contemporary approaches.

Though its traditional gambrel (also known as mansard) roof matches historic buildings on nearby blocks, the new building’s windows and doors are placed asymmetrically, and a massive sliding exterior shade can cover the glass on two floors at once.

At first, MacKay-Lyons and his team, who also developed the project, briefly considered a more explicitly modern building clad in weathered steel, juxtaposed against the historic structure. “But the UNESCO guy said, ‘What part of wood don’t you understand?’” the architect recalls with a laugh. “So I said, ‘No problem.’ And why not? The ego doesn’t need to be so front and center.”

MacKay-Lyons, a winner of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s prestigious Gold Medal, has spent his career thinking about how traditional and modern architectural ideas intersect—and especially thinking about Lunenburg.

Born in nearby Arcadia, he studied architecture at the Technical University of Nova Scotia in the late 1970s before moving on to graduate school in urban design at UCLA. MacKay-Lyons realized it wasn’t just the colorful, old buildings that made Lunenburg and other historic Nova Scotia towns special—but also the way the structures were assembled.

“In a way, the idea of the city or the landscape is the primary project, rather than individual buildings,” he says. “I’ve always believed simple dwellings aggregated well is the thing, rather than doing buildings as objects.”

While in Los Angeles, MacKay-Lyons worked for (and was mentored by) legendary architect Charles Moore, who has been called the father of postmodern architecture. Though MacKay-Lyons’s contemporary work is free of the irony and oversized gestures associated with postmodernism, the architect retains its fundamental premise: that the past can be an inspiration, and a touchstone for architectural humility in an age of starchitects.

Take the traditional roof that tops the new B2 Lofts building. “I don’t even like gambrel roofs much, but surely that’s irrelevant,” the architect says. “It’s not always about you, right? The town is connected by those gambrel-roof warehouses.”

For the past 25 years, MacKay-Lyons has made Lunenburg a course of study while teaching graduate studios at Halifax’s Dalhousie University, and through visiting professorships at Harvard and several other American colleges. The topic is, as he calls it, “a vehicle for teaching good manners in infill.”

His firm has actually developed numerous projects in the past, almost always starting with a new architectural studio as an anchor. One of those past MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple offices, for example, was a renovated gas station. After teaching about Lunenburg, it was time to put the lessons into practice.

“I thought, not only are we going to put our money where our mouth is—but we’re going to call it by the course number,” the architect says. “I’m someone who sticks to their knitting, and the people I respect do that.”

Six loft-style apartments occupy the floors above the B2 Lofts’ ground-floor commercial spaces. “It’s a mix of unit sizes, because we were hedging our bets against who lives there. But they share the same DNA,” MacKay-Lyons explains. “Three face the street, three face the harbor. We made a dense kitchen/bathroom combo against the party wall, so you have the maximum great room size. You have two-story units for the first part, and don’t need public circulation. It’s your old stacked-townhouse story.”

Shop the Look

In both the new and old buildings, the designers placed living rooms on top, to devote the best views to public spaces and allow vaulted ceilings.

While units in the older building enjoy a cozy mood thanks to wall-to-wall wood paneling in the living rooms, the vaulted ceilings of the newer building are marked by distinctive crisscrossing metal rods, which provide added structural support but could easily be mistaken for sculpture.

“It’s like stringing a tennis racket,” Mackay-Lyons says. “The cool thing is that a secondary trade to shipbuilding in Lunenburg is the miscellaneous-metals trade. I just walked across the street to get the stuff. It’s like the rigging you’d find on a ship, this cobweb of rods upstairs. We have big wind loads here because of the ocean. Those cables go right down to the floor and create a whole lot of little triangles with cheap little connections. Lots of little cables can share the load. That’s inherited from boat-building.”

Ultimately for MacKay Lyons, developing and designing the B2 Lofts—in partnership with the architect's wife, Marilyn MacKay-Lyons, who also served as interior designer for the project—is about one piece in a larger puzzle: providing the answer to a need.

“It’s a town that doesn’t have enough housing in it, so you build more housing. It’s not rocket science. If you’re idealistic, if you can’t find that client, do it yourself,” he says.

But the trick, the architect adds, is to never tip fully into development. “Our rule is we don’t become developers other than to do something we actually need ourselves,” he adds. “That way you’re only doing things you believe in.”

More from MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects:

This Cedar-Shingle Cottage Gives Nova Scotia’s Fishing History a Modern Spin

Three Cor-Ten Steel Pavilions Make Up This Art Collectors’ Rugged Retreat

Escape to the Woods in These Sustainable Canadian Cabins

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects / @MLSArchitects

Builder: G.R. Kilgour Construction

Structural Engineer: Campbell Comeau Engineering Limited

Interior Design: Marilyn MacKay-Lyons