Nautical Abodes

Just because your kitchen is on the smaller side doesn’t mean you can’t make it as efficient and effective as possible.

The couple plan to add a kitchen garden to the platform just below the terrace that connects to the kitchen.

Cedar slats mark the facade of Floating House, Doug and Becca Worple's lake house in Ontario. The architects, MOS, chose materials and shapes that wouldn’t stand out. “They’re really simple, almost Platonic forms,” principal Michael Meredith says. The modest cabin has boat, a gabled roof and a cladding of untreated cedar, a material that shows up on docks and homes along Georgian Bay. “Allowing the buildings to weather seems the right thing to do,” Sample says. And it’s ready for winter: Sliding barn doors seal the place up as an impenetrable box.

The view from inside the Floating House's boat dock.

The exterior of the Popadich residence is modeled after boat storage sheds, while the interior is outfitted with industrial concrete and ply.

Glimpsed from the outside, it becomes clear how an internal corridor flows through both structures at an uncommon angle.

The view from the master bedroom down the long cedar corridor into the living room is one of the home’s real pleasures.

The porthole window in the master bedroom not only evokes the sea, it looks out onto it.