Foul Weather Is No Match for This Boxy New Brunswick Home—or the Steel Stair Wrapped Around It

Along the coast where gable homes squat low to fend off driving wind and rain, Peter Braithwaite Studio created a resilient three-level residence with a rooftop patio.

Architect Peter Braithwaite isn’t deterred by harsh weather. In fact, he says "it’s part of the charm" of living and working in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where windy and wet conditions batter fishing houses and residences that dot the craggy coastline.

With his eponymous design-build firm, Braithwaite has crafted his share of dwellings in the region, all of which feel as if they’ve been dropped in nature, but are built "so they don’t blow away in the wind," he says. The first time he visited the site for his latest clients’ home on the shores of Bathurst, New Brunswick, "the rain came in horizontally," he recalls.

Among low-slung gable homes and fishing cottages overlooking Chaleur Bay in Nova Scotia, a young couple built a full-time residence they call The Sandbox. "It’s a modern structure," says project architect Peter Braithwaite, "but it draws from the local culture and building traditions."

Photo: Ema Peter

His clients, a young couple who were keen to build a year-round residence, wanted to be able to host and drink in expansive coastline views over Chaleur Bay, an area within the Gulf of St. Lawrence. "The location was ruggedly beautiful, and the clients’ ambitions seemed both appropriate to the waterfront location and challenging enough to pique our interest," Braithwaite says. From the start, connecting their lifestyle to the coastal landscape and climate was the design’s driving force.

With the clients acting as builder on the project, Braithwaite designed a cedar-clad box with generous windows on the first and second levels that run almost the length of the facade and wrap around slightly at its north and east corners. Known as The Sandbox—"it’s literally a box on the sand," Braithwaite explains—the waterfront home has a commanding presence among its low-slung gable-roofed neighbors.

Flanges in Cor-Ten steel forming a hood at the entry and vertical cedar cladding elongate the home. The cedar has been treated to take on patina more quickly, but both materials will continue to weather and become more rugged.

Ema Peter

For the vertical cladding, Braithwaite chose a knotty Eastern cedar. Before being installed, the planks were hand-dipped in a mixture of water and LifeTime, a natural powder that helps preserve the wood while hastening its patina. "When cedar first goes up, if it’s not treated in this manner, it has a lot of red and yellow hues that aren’t really a part of the vernacular," Braithwaite says. "Over time," he explains, "it turns this beautiful silvery gray. The preservative expedites that process. It makes it fit into its location more quickly." Today, the cedar planks reflect the exteriors of the area’s fishing buildings, or the weather-beaten shingles of coastal homes in nearby Maine.

An exterior staircase, also in Cor-Ten steel, leads from the second floor to the couple’s rooftop patio. It is designed to "for views above the single-story neighboring cottages," Braithwaite says.

Ema Peter

See the full story on Dwell.com: Foul Weather Is No Match for This Boxy New Brunswick Home—or the Steel Stair Wrapped Around It
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