House With Big Shingles by D’Arcy Jones Architects – A Contemporary Forest Retreat in West Vancouver

Nestled within the mature coastal rainforest of Sandy Cove in West Vancouver, House With Big Shingles by D’Arcy Jones Architects reinterprets a complex natural site through inventive geometry, expressive materiality, and a deep respect for its dramatic surroundings. Designed in 2023 and spanning 442 m², the home replaces a once-iconic Ron Thom residence while engaging the landscape with a bold architectural language that balances memory, context, and contemporary craftsmanship.

Context: A House Framed by Mountain, Ocean, and Forest

The project sits in a rare pocket of land surrounded by towering Douglas fir and Western red cedar, with three distinct “fronts” offering completely different visual experiences:

• Cypress Mountain to the north
• Burrard Inlet to the south
• Lighthouse Park to the west

The site’s rugged granite terrain and wraparound exposure made it both inspiring and challenging. Although the original 1960s Ron Thom house was demolished after an intense preservation debate, the new design pays homage to its predecessor by adopting angular geometries and site-responsive planning.

Design Strategy: A Hexagonal Grid Inspired by Usonian Ideals

Drawing influence from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian floor plans, the architects constructed the house around an innovative hexagonal grid, transforming the irregularity of the landscape into purposeful spatial relationships.

Reversing the Conventional Layout

To maximize daylight and panoramic views:

• Private areas—bedrooms and family spaces—occupy the lower and middle levels, grounding them in the landscape.
• Public spaces—kitchen, dining, and living zones—are placed on the upper floor, where sweeping mountain, forest, and ocean views unfold throughout the day.

This inversion creates a light-filled top level that connects directly to the environment while maintaining privacy at lower levels.

Embracing the Horizon

The upper floor features a continuous wrap-around deck, offering sheltered outdoor living in every direction—a crucial advantage in Vancouver’s rainy climate. The chevron-shaped plan naturally forms a protected cove on the south side, creating a private microenvironment for the pool and terrace.

At each end of the house, the angular points extend like the prow of a ship, guiding the eye toward Burrard Inlet where freighters anchor offshore. High clerestory-style openings intentionally avoid floor-to-ceiling glazing to maintain a horizontal, intimate relationship with the horizon.

Materiality: Big Cedar Shingles and an Interior of Light

The architectural character of the house is defined by its playful yet sophisticated use of custom oversized red cedar shingles—four times the size of traditional shingles. This creates:

• A unique, quirky scale that blends with the forest
• A compact, almost handcrafted appearance
• A tactile relationship between occupants and the wood grain

A custom stain matches the bark tones of surrounding trees, allowing the house to age gracefully and feel rooted in place from day one.

A Soft, Luminous Interior

Inside, the design transitions into a glowing white envelope that diffuses ambient light throughout the space. Every trim and detail continues the angular geometry of the floor plan, with 45-degree chamfered boards that wrap the interior like a continuous Möbius strip—an effect that is both dynamic and serene.

The interplay of crisp interior detailing with the deeply textured exterior creates a powerful dialogue between precision and nature, modernity and craft.

A Thoughtful Replacement That Honors Site and History

House With Big Shingles is more than a contemporary residence—it is a study in respectful replacement, using geometry, material warmth, and landscape integration to reinvent a historically charged site. Through careful planning and expressive detailing, D’Arcy Jones Architects deliver a home that feels at once grounded in its forest environment and elevated in its architectural ambition.

All photographs are works of Sama Jim Canzian