Project Name: Liminal House / Project Location: West Vancouver, BC, Canada / Designer: McLeod Bovell / Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada / Project Size: 10,940 square feet / Photography: Hufton+Crow
The clients for this custom home approached McLeod Bovell at a pivotal stage in their lives: They were soon-to-be empty nesters. As a result, their family’s evolving needs became the impetus for how the designers imagined a house that could embody the state of transition at a conceptual and experiential level. The word liminal encapsulates ideas that have informed the design process–the feeling of inhabiting a transitory place, orchestrating movement through space and dwelling in the moments between “from” and “to.”
Positioned on an expanded border between land and sea, the project site straddles the interstice between a suburban residential neighborhood and West Vancouver’s natural stony seashore. The building form references the creatures that occupy this interstitial territory, whose physiology has adapted to such challenging conditions. In the same spirit, the house is built using concrete, stained Accoya wood and aluminum plate—enduring materials that can resist the battering effect of a shore environment.
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Drawing from their experience negotiating complex topography and tight proximity with neighbours, the design firm abandoned the reading of the project as a series of flat “elevations” that exist from an imaginary or inaccessible viewpoint. Instead, they embrace a scenographic approach where the house can be understood after having moved through and around it. The language of courtyards, cantilevered volumes and extension of landscaped surfaces onto floor areas below dismantle boundaries between the house and the natural environment.
“The changing outdoor atmosphere at the shore not only animates the house, but is in turn animated by the house: views are framed between solid walls and walls of glass; their images duplicated by a dark pool at the edge of the property and by the glazing of internal courtyards,” the firm writes in the project background. “Reflections and refractions of the outdoors evoke a feeling of being neither here nor there, but somewhere in between.”
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