Macdonald, who speaks softly and thoughtfully, is proud of the way the house provides different sorts of experiences. “The openness and the distant views you get on the front are complemented by the containment of the back,” he says. “Sometimes you need somewhere to retreat.” That's provided by the rear patio, tightly enclosed by a retaining wall and a series of terraces on the hill above. A stone staircase climbs the hill, and if you walk up it you can take in the full extent of Macdonald's artistry: a canopy of Douglas fir beams, and the artfully composed grid of windows, covered in places by panelling and by a screen of vertical wood slats.
This is evidence of the house's other's rare quality, its remarkable woodwork. The windows, doors and cabinetry that wrap almost the entire building were made by the Ungers' own company, Kobi's Cabinets. Led by Georg, their shop does work of extremely high quality; Macdonald worked with Georg in building his own house at Wychwood. The Ellis Park house shows the craftsman and the architect, two perfectionists, at the top of their games. This plays out in a seamless integration between the big spatial “moves” and the smallest details. For instance, where the house's (beautiful) steel columns meet the hardwood floor, there is a small steel plate notched into wood, and its four sides meet the ipe[CHK] wood with razor-straight precision.
That may sound trivial, but it's not. For Macdonald – as for the great B.C. modernist Ron Thom, who was a mentor – small gestures and large ones reinforce each other. Take the register covers. In most houses heat registers are haphazardly placed, covered with store-bought rectangles of brown steel. Here the covers are custom-made by Georg Unger, and they're camouflaged into long strips of notched wood. “This continues across the entire floor like a train,” Georg says, pointing out the six-inch-wide strip. “Sometimes it's a register, sometimes it's a solid panel.”
And this is more than an aesthetic fetish; it is a deliberate move to make the house's rooms seem larger. “When you have an open space, you don't want to have visual information that communicates a sense of scale,” Macdonald explains. “Even those typical register covers, which are four by twelve inches – your eye understands that, even subconsciously, and it says, if that's twelve inches, this room must be so big.” Macdonald's architecture works by denying these clues and massaging your sense of proportion. The lack of walls in the open plan, and the lack of standard reference points like doorframes, contribute to a sense of ambiguity about the size and shape of the room you are in.
