Frame House Design by Marc Boutin in Canada

Built for a young family of five, this home project called The Frame House was designed by architects Marc Boutin from Canada is situated within a recreational landscape, in Invermere, British Columbia, Canada. The Frame House design is not only the living space, but also becomes a tool by which one’s senses of the natural environment are increased, it acts as a lens to the beautiful environment. Simultaneously, the house incorporates sustainable design strategies, including natural ventilation, passive solar gain, a geothermal field, and solar hot water heating. Consequently, the house design exists virtually “off the grid”, minimizing its impact both poetic and literal on the site itself.

The juxtaposition of its geometry at the home design to the surrounding landscape accentuates the mountain and evergreen forest setting in which the house is situated. The home design itself functions as a ‘frame’ which explores both the view to the mountains and the private/public space relationship implicit in the home program. This is achieved mainly by the surface treatment of the exterior on front and rear home facades.

The Northwest side of the frame house design is a controlled, opaque façade. This is also the façade where the main entry to the home design is situated, effectively disconnecting the viewer from the mountains immediately prior to dramatically framing this same view as one enters the house. The Southeast side of the house is an operable glazed façade which opens to the mountains and to exterior landscaped amenities, which extend the house into its surroundings. As the exterior spaces are embedded within a conditioned ground plane that serves to define and shelter the exterior spaces, the experience is not as mannered as within the interior space, providing a more primal connection to the natural phenomena. Simultaneously, these landscape walls are conceived as a sculpted base for the pristine frame of the house hovering above.

Within this frame, a carefully orchestrated ‘box’ contains the private spaces of the house. This box is a ‘house within a house’ that still affords views to the mountains, but mediates the view in a controlled manner that serves to heighten the experience. On the main level of this box are the 3 bedrooms for the kids and all of the service spaces for the house, such as washrooms, laundry rooms, and storage. The master bedroom and ensuite bathroom are located on the mezzanine level. As such, the frame of the house defines a two-storey open ‘public’ volume that contains the social amenities of the house. From this space of the house, 18ft high sliding glass doors open to an outdoor patio, swimming pool, hot tub and to the view of the mountains. Meaning is embedded into the circulation between these two volumes, creating a series of occupied layers, each individually acting as its own “frame” that modulates the mountains and picturesque landscape in subtly different ways.