Esquimalt House

The Esquimalt house is situated on an steep and unusually wide property with significant views of downtown Vancouver, the Lion’s Gate Bridge and Burrard Inlet. The client’s, who came to Canada from East Africa, requested that their house operate at different scales: as a space for religious gatherings and business, as well as a place for them as a couple. The low-contrast grey and white palette of the house is intended to create a gallery-like setting for the display of artifacts of cultural and religious significance.

Movement and program are terraced laterally and vertically across the site and through the house, mitigating the slope and separating quasi-public areas at one side of the property from private living spaces on the other. Bedrooms are consolidated into a compact upper floor volume to one side of the house where they float above an elongated main floor.