An Abandoned Boathouse Catches a Second Wind as a Shipshape Tiny Home

Toronto architect Greg Neudorf and his wife, Trina Macrae, always loved staying at a family vacation home on Stony Lake (in the Kawartha Lakes area of Ontario, Canada) that Trina’s parents purchased when she was a child. With the lake’s local tradition of sailboat regattas and the residence’s spectacular peninsula site with water views in multiple directions, the getaway makes an idyllic alternative to big-city life.

Yet with multiple branches of the family looking to visit (sometimes simultaneously), Greg and Trina eventually began eyeing a derelict boathouse on the property with plans to convert it to a guest cottage.

They still needed to store a motorboat and a small sailboat, so the new building would have to host both equipment and guests. Luckily, perching a 400-square-foot residence above a new boathouse brought the opportunity for even more picturesque views. "It really is kind of our happy place," Greg says.

As a senior architect and designer at the Toronto office of Montreal architecture firm Saucier + Perrotte, Greg was used to working on larger projects like academic buildings and condo towers. Yet while the scale here was smaller—even smaller than a single-family house—the goal was the same, which he describes as "a kind of coherent simplicity."

The two-story structure benefits from its application as a boathouse, in that it’s right up against the water. Two rails extend from the garage to allow watercraft to launch straight into the lake. (Trina and Greg’s daughter and two sons, aged between four and eight years, are taking sailing lessons, using the family’s two-person kit sailboat.)