The clients sought a connected design that would provide them with a sense of “cottage in the city”. This did not mean a faux expression of a leisure cabin—rather a dwelling in a conceptual manner: a feeling of warmth, reflection, and family.

Dove is conceived as a series of interconnected pavilions, like tents in the landscape, rather than rooms filling out an enclosed shell. Each space is independently situated and connected by multiple routes, so that each main room becomes a destination in itself, where its paths are celebrated. The experience of moving through the project was envisioned as a walk-through Ontario woods— gently up over logs, with low canopies dramatically sweeping to towering heights, squeezing through rock canyons, passing water streams... all sunlit from unexpected places.

The house is distinguished by its deeply ridged cast-in-place concrete — serving as both structural support and the finished texture within. The surface of the concrete carries the grain of the rough wood boards used to form it, giving a rich tactile character, and expressing the memory of its making. The folded main roof, faced with local white birch on the interior and weathering steel on its exterior skin, rises gently through the spaces, cradling the interior like a canopy.

The building was designed to be rigorous in its performance: it makes use of ground-source heating and cooling, it generates electrical power from an extensive solar photovoltaic array, and it draws water from a well on site. The thermal design of the building’s envelope was carefully engineered far outperforming the standards set by the building code.