The article below, originally appearing in the 2014 issue of HIDEAWAYS Magazine, erroneously used the the term “architect”. Mr. Gillett is not a member of the OAA and is not licensed to engage in the practice of architecture in Ontario. The term “architect” in Ontario refers only to those who are members of the OAA.
The young couple sit in the boardroom of their architect’s office, as the computer generates its 3D rendering of their new Muskoka cottage. It rotates in front of them like something from a movie they vaguely remember, all angular, cantilevered, glass and steel.
“But do we have to live in a statement?” they ask, bewildered.
What they want, of course, is a Muskoka Cottage. They aren’t sure what that is, exactly, but they have the keen sense that they’ll know it when they see it.
They aren’t alone. Chasing that elusive mystery, the Muskoka Style, has been an ongoing hunt for decades. Flip through any book of Muskoka history and there will be faded black and white photos of the first crop of summer houses, those built after the arrival of the railroad in Gravenhurst in 1875, or Bracebridge in 1886. By 1914, there were more than 300 cottages on the three main lakes.
Architectural themes emerge in these photos with something like consistency: deep verandahs dark with cool shadow, robust granite masonry, all-encompassing roofs. They look like buildings rooted in a harsh landscape, at home in a forest clearing and, at the same time, light and cheerful — summer places rather than baronial seats.
There are flourishes as well: flights of a carpenter’s fancy that somehow seem at home perched at the water’s edge — gingerbread brackets, cupolas with bell-cast roofs, twig detailing with a whiff of the Adirondacks about it.
And then came the paved highways, the baby boom, and that greatest of all levellers: the affordable automobile. Steamer trunks were relegated to antique stores. Railways shut down. Steamships morphed into tourist rides, curiosities, art print subjects. The cottage weekend, complete with the three-hour Friday night drive, was born.
At that point, depending on your outlook, cottage design either went decidedly down-market and pedestrian, or it became something of the people-for-the-people, and a brave new world was born.
Around the globe in the fifties and sixties, an architectural earthquake shook the foundations of design. It fit well with the social revolution that was happening and locked step with the flashpoints of sex and music. It had a lot to do with throwing off the old and embracing the new; and, in urban contexts, the architectural revolution advanced at a blurred pace, paving the world with flat roofs, glass walls, concrete cantilevers, form following function. In 1965, French architect LeCorbusier spoke of the house as “a machine for living.”
Muskoka was slower to pick up this torch and there are only a few examples of modern cottages from that era that broke new ground. The change was slower, maybe more cautious, a bit more backward looking … all very Muskoka I’d say. But the sixties did start to inject more fun into cottage style and, as new materials arrived and new demographics shifted the mix of people on the docks, fresh ideas entered the vocabulary of building: picture windows, vaulted ceilings, lofts, sliding glass doors.
The grand old cottages in the faded black and white photographs had new neighbours. But cottages still had to fulfil some very basic requirements to be successful.
You can safely bet that Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, that early Roman architect and writer, had never summered in Muskoka. Yet the wise maxim for which he is deservedly famous sums up neatly the key components of successful Muskoka design. “Architecture,” wrote Vitruvius (but first in Latin of course), “consists of Firmness, Commodity and Delight.”
Firmness, or structural stability and good building science, has to be there, or the roof leaks and the deck collapses. This one is usually achieved to some reasonable degree of success thanks to Building Codes and competent builders.
Commodity, or a layout and size that accommodates the unusual life that happens in Muskoka, is harder to nail. Cottages too large or too small, layouts that ignore the family’s potential expansion, positions that disregard the ‘genius of place’ and aim instead for showmanship — all of these are sins that abound in cottage country, often growing blacker as more money is thrown into the mix. The couple who don’t want to live in a ‘statement’ can sense the importance of Commodity: they want a plan that is comfortable, flexible and good for the future, but they are often sold one that will look good in a magazine and fit a certain new sectional sofa.
That brings us to Vitruvius' last ingredient of good architecture: Delight.
Whether it’s a grand rambling Beaumaris estate or a chiseled glass box on a cliff, we know by instinct if a cottage is delightful. And while Beauty is often in the eye of the beholder, most of us sense in our gut when we've beheld it, and when the composition is delightful.
I recently presented a design to clients on a snowy weekend in Boston. The Storm of The Century raged around us, turning Boston Common into an arctic wilderness and the city itself into something out of Doctor Zhivago. But when the drawings were spread across the table, the stormy background fell silent and it was summertime on Lake Joseph. Something about the coursed stonework and the flared cedar wall, the proportion of the columns and the slant of the roof somehow whispered ‘Muskoka’. The spell was cast.
The style of the building was them, of course, and wouldn't have fit everyone. But the palette of materials — natural, real and of the place — would have worked for anyone. These materials, from cedar shingles to copper valley flashings to split-face granite, work visually and practically in this changeable climate. And they look right in a way that plastic and pastiche don't.
Any architect worth his or her salt (another Roman saying) knows these things. And any good first-year architecture course will cover another key word: context.
In downtown Toronto, the context is man-made and about things like neighbourhoods, scale, and historical continuity. But what does it mean to a Muskoka cottage? The context that looms largest and demands the most respect is overwhelmingly natural: towering white pines, cliffs of granite bedrock, stands of Tamarack. Unlike parts of, say, the Hamptons or Malibu, there are no showcase rows of Starchitect icons (and thank goodness for that). Most cottages on the lakes of Muskoka are little outposts of construction set into a dense blanket of green, brown, and grey with water before and a big sky above.
In the end, as Henry David Thoreau put it, “All work passes out of the hand of the architect into the hands of nature, to be perfected.” It’s true of the best summer cottages: they become one with their surroundings and improve with age.
And in this era of transient jobs, globalization, and easy international travel, they also become something else: the family seat, the one constant go-to place for increasingly dispersed families. ‘The cottage’ means home more and more often now, an incubator for childhood memories, a touchstone for family traditions, the one place worth returning to every year when the days lengthen and the air warms. These are the hideaways where we can be most like our true selves, half-clothed on a dock at twilight.
Our young couple in the architect’s office will, in the end, live in a statement of some sort. Hopefully it’s a statement about who they are and what they find important, rather than one that simply says ‘look at us’.
All of these things — firmness, commodity, delight, materials that suit their setting, a floor plan that allows the gathering of the generations — these are all things that they are looking for as they stare into the screen and see their design coming to life.
For their sake, and for the sake of all of us who want these special shores to stay special, I hope they find them there.
- by David Gillett, B.Arch MRAIC
David Gillett graduated from the University of Toronto School of Architecture in 1983, later enhancing his formal education with a study of the waterfront homes of the Maritimes, New England, and California. David frequently tours the United Kingdom to sketch its country estates and landscape design. He enjoys researching and writing about cottage life in the Muskoka region; and his work has been featured in several books and magazines, including ‘Canadian House and Home’ and ‘The New York Times’.
