An Abandoned Boathouse Catches a Second Wind as a Shipshape Tiny Home
Toronto architect Gregory Neudorf creates a pristine and practical 400-square-foot dwelling with nautical storage below deck.
Toronto architect Gregory Neudorf creates a pristine and practical 400-square-foot dwelling with nautical storage below deck.
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.
One of the boathouse’s two bedrooms can accommodate up to four adults or children, thanks to a quartet of bunk beds beside a wall of glass.
Jamie K. Thomson
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.
The front of the house is the back of the boathouse garage, with the front door opening onto a small foyer and a half-bath before a stairway to the main living area.
Jamie K. Thomson
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.)
On the boathouse’s lake side, the family can open a garage door and lead one of their two small boats down the rails and into the water. Beside is a small deck.
Jamie K. Thomson
See the full story on Dwell.com: An Abandoned Boathouse Catches a Second Wind as a Shipshape Tiny Home
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