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Holidaying on Lake Muskoka is, or was, a staid and often stately affair. Some houses there are very grand. But the most successful Muskoka cottages, of whatever size and vintage, have always partaken of local building traditions that go back to the late Victorian origins of cottaging on the lake. I am thinking here of modest timber cabins put up in the early days by small-town Ontario ministers, doctors and teachers, often along lines suggested by British small-house originals; and of charming places that nestle back into the region's forests and rocks.

Now for a Lake Muskoka cottage that is very different from all that.

Designed by Martin Kohn, partner in the Toronto firm Kohn Shnier Architects, this house is a forthright expression of Modernist architectural style and thought, installed on a slope in Ontario's least Modernist zone. Those with romantic notions about Muskoka and its architecture (as I have) will find nothing here that fits the classic mould. With its long, flat line of floor-to-ceiling glass doors opening toward the lake, the cottage looks like a strip motel dropped into the woods -- a comparison Mr. Kohn invites and approves.

As it happens, however, this distinctive appearance -- of a motel or dormitory -- evolved naturally enough from the demanding commission. The building had to be big. The client, who already had a cottage on the site, asked Mr. Kohn for a separate holiday house that would shelter, all at once, his two grown-up offspring and their families -- a total of four parents, six small children, and various nannies and aides. (The two-level house contains five washrooms; when fully outfitted, it will also have 20 mattresses in 10 sleeping rooms.)

In addition to size, the client wanted speed -- two requirements that, Mr. Kohn explained to me, could best be satisfied by factory production. That's certainly not something foreign to the architect's practice. About three years ago, Mr. Kohn and John Shnier, his business partner, unveiled designs for the Royal Q, an affordable prefabricated house to be manufactured by Royal Homes in Wingham, Ont. While no Q homes have been sold by Royal so far, the practical experience of figuring out the techniques and technologies of factory-produced housing seems to have confirmed in Mr. Kohn a durable appreciation for the aesthetics of the modular and mass-produced.

Working again with the engineers in Wingham, Mr. Kohn designed the Muskoka cottage as seven separate units, the largest 16 feet wide -- the maximum allowable for transport on public roads -- and all complete with glass and wiring. Manufacture took just 25 days. These units were then trucked to the site along highways and a difficult dirt road, and dropped where they were to go, on a long slope below a ridge. The wide cedar decks on the lake side of the upper and lower levels were added later.

The outcome is a long, flat-topped structure that, in its general form, is an odd, inert intrusion into its forest setting. That said, the building may mellow a bit as time goes by. Tucked under the hilltop by the lake, the cottage is already invisible from approach roads, and is decidedly set back from the water's edge. Weather will turn its cedar a silvery grey. In time, despite its large size, the cottage will likely recede somewhat into the natural environment. But it won't recede much: Mr. Kohn's industrial-strength Modernism is deeply inscribed in the house's lines and profile.

The architect's anti-historical styling, of course, has a venerable pedigree in the design of country retreats, especially in the United States during the last century. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House (1945-1951), on the banks of the Fox River in Illinois, is a white-painted, flat-topped contradiction in glass and steel to just about anybody's mid-century notion of what a country seat should look like.

A similar dissent to traditionalism is expressed by Philip Johnson's famous Glass House (1949) in New Canaan, Conn. While neither of these homes embodied big chunks of prefabricated architecture, as Mr. Kohn's house does, they nevertheless announced the same general openness to nature, the same commitment to modernity as a style and idea.

I like the works of Mies and Johnson very much. If I am hesitant about Mr. Kohn's similarly Modernist cottage, it's partly because (apart from my romanticism) the Muskoka architectural traditions it rejects seem to me far from exhausted, and indeed worthy of fresh attention and review. These traditions still have much to teach architects about mindful dwelling on the Ontario land, and under the bright, wide skies of Ontario's cottage country.

jmays@globeandmail.com