Having grown up in this historic Ontario farmhouse, the owners, two siblings, have long known about the local lore attached to it. For starters, the house had been previously owned by Rear Admiral Horatio Nelson Lay and his wife, Beth. “We had a family dog that was named after the admiral,” says the older sibling. “There was sort of a mythology around the house for our parents.”

Lay, a decorated veteran of WWII, was given an Order of the British Empire award for his service as the commanding officer of the HMS Nabob when it was damaged by a German submarine, and he helped to evacuate Dunkirk troops. According to his autobiography, Memoirs of a Mariner, he liked to keep busy with handicrafts and hobbies, and was known to pass the time on his ships by hooking rugs or building furniture.

In 1989, the siblings’ parents bought the house from Lay’s widow, who was very active in the local community. “Our parents cared so much about the property,” says the younger sibling, noting that their mother could often be found outside tending her garden beds. “Being on the river, it’s just a really idyllic and special place.”

Before (1976): Front Facade

Before (1991): Front Facade

After: Front Facade

When the siblings inherited the property from their parents decades later, the original brick farmhouse, which was built in the late 1800s, had been expanded with two rear additions. A large, linear sunroom connected the body of the farmhouse with two extra bedrooms, and there’s a square sunporch on an opposite corner.

In 2020, one of the children was going through a stack of family paperwork. “That’s when I found these hand-drawn architectural plans,” says the older sibling. “It took me a minute to realize it was the same house.”

As drawn, the plans revealed a much more modern linear sunroom addition, with a flat roof, eight-foot-tall windows, and vertical wood siding. This iteration stood in stark contrast to the existing structure, which had a pitched roof and light-blue board-and-batten siding more in keeping with farmhouse style.

Even more confusing, was that the architect’s name, followed by the initials ARIBA, indicated they had been an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The older sibling was intrigued: “Why was there some English architect drawing plans for a farmhouse?”

It turns out that Admiral Lay had been introduced by his son to British architect John Honer, who was then working in the offices of John Parkin, on the new Department of National Defense building in Ottawa. Honer agreed to design Lay’s farmhouse addition on his nights and weekends, and he later returned to England and worked as executive architect on London’s Barbican Centre, considered an icon of brutalist architecture. (Or, the city’s “ugliest building,” depending on who you talk to.)

From that moment of discovery, the siblings were hooked by the mystery that the plans presented: “It became very exciting and interesting, and I got really into the history,” the older sibling says.

Before (1976): Rear Facade

Before (1991): Rear Facade

After: Rear Facade

Before (1976): Honer Addition

Before (1991): Honer Addition

After: Honer Addition

In 2022, the siblings reached out to LAMAS Architecture to renovate the home, which they call Fallbrook Farmhouse, using the original Honer addition as inspiration. They wanted the comprehensive overhaul to bring in sustainable features, like increased insulation, local materials, and solar power, to complement the geothermal system their parents had added.

Before (1991): Side Elevation

Before: LAMAS removed the crisscrossing blue board-and batten siding for a more streamlined look.

After: Side Elevation

After: Entry

They also needed the floor plan to be more comfortable for their families to stay. “There was only one shower in the house,” says the older sibling, so they added a bathroom, expanded the kitchen for multiple cooks, and asked LAMAS to clean up the general flow. “In terms of the interior aesthetic, it was a farmhouse, but it was also this cool, modernist structure, and we wanted to reflect both of those sides of the house.”

Before (1991): Kitchen

After: Kitchen

Early on, the clients presented LAMAS with a book called Barbican Residents: Inside the Iconic Brutalist Estate, and the team noticed similar details between the two projects, which informed the design process. “The large, eight-foot windows (and the unique way they are divided), the solid oak stair with open treads and open guardrail...a lot of these features were tested, it seemed, in Honer’s solo work at Fallbrook,” says architect and LAMAS cofounder James Macgillivray. “We started to see the bones of Honer’s design underneath the 1990s renovation by comparing the spaces and details to the Barbican photos.”

Before (1991): Dining Room

After: Dining Room

The design team started by streamlining the exterior, replacing the blue board-and-batten siding with custom-cut clear cedar from a local mill. “We thought that if we left the wood natural and it went silver over time, that it would end up looking like a board-formed concrete,” says Macgillivray, which keeps with a “brutalist vocabulary.”

Inside, they removed plaster to reveal the original brick farmhouse wall in the sunroom, replaced windows with triple-glazed wood units, and restored the original 19th-century pine floors in the farmhouse where possible, sourcing new solid pine boards from a local mill.

Before (1991): Staircase

After: Staircase

After: Study

One big move was to relocate a stairwell to the basement, stacking it beneath the existing Honer-designed staircase in the library and adding a guard rail. The move allowed the architects to open up a doorway between the kitchen and sunroom, improving airflow and circulation.

“We went from a falling-apart kitchen to one where seven people are cooking at the same time,” says the younger sibling. A detail in the Barbican book also inspired the color treatments throughout, with muted olives and blues now demarcating some thresholds, built-in shelves, and the bathroom tile.

Before (1976): Sunroom

Before (1991): Sunroom

After: Sunroom

At the conclusion of the project, the LAMAS team gifted the homeowners with a remastered Fleetwood Mac album for the record player in the sunroom. It’s the perfect soundtrack to the summer days the siblings now enjoy there—swimming in the river, cooking together in the kitchen, and eating meals on the sunporch.

“It’s really lovely to be in the house together now, with it all revitalized,” says the younger sibling—especially for the children in the family, who will grow up knowing all of the local lore, as well as their own family’s story as it continues there. “The house is so much a part of the kids’ history. It’s really significant that they get to connect with that,” adds the older sibling.