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In the stylistic lingo of custom house builders and shelter magazines, "West Coast," "contemporary," and "modernist" are thought to be separate, exclusive and self-contradicting design categories. The just-announced winner of the top prize at the Canadian Wood Council's British Columbia design awards shows just how foolish these rigidly-walled style-bins can be.

The impressive post and beam, concrete and Douglas fir house on a steep slope halfway up West Vancouver's Sentinel Hill deserves all of these descriptors, and more.

With a dedication to maximizing glass in our too-grey climate, and with evident pride in showing off its glulam structure, red cedar cladding and Douglas fir roof decking, this house is as "West Coast" as can be. The house is a descendent of the mid-20th century innovations of Ron Thom, Arthur Erickson and Barry Downs in Vancouver and Paul Hayden Kirk in Seattle, while also being a sentimental cousin to recent buildings by Blue Sky Architecture here, plus James Cutler or Miller and Hull in our sister city.

The house, built for Linda and Andrew Buttjes, the owners of Mountain Technologies, an electronic control board manufacturer, just as surely earns the title of "contemporary," with its gracefully-extended butterfly roof perched on a massive board-formed concrete base — as edgy and au courant as West Vancouver gets.

But the 5,100-square-foot house is also "modernist" in sensibility and execution, with a strong discipline of order sustaining a logical relationship with site forces and interior needs.

Heavens to Mies van der Rohe, the house even boasts twinned bare steel columns With the Tugendhat house in Brno near Vienna and others, the former Bauhaus director indulged the expressive possibilities of raw steel structure as an unlikely but effective domestic icon.

The son of a German immigrant who arrived in Canada in 1952 with two wooden crates and an architecture degree, Andrew Buttjes had lived in the area for 25 years and purchased the site nearby.

He at first offered the commission to design a house for the site to an architect brother.

His brother declined, but suggested Brad Lamoureux, a West Vancouver architect whose practice is mainly devoted to high-end custom houses.

"We wanted an architect-designed house," says Mr. Buttjes, "But with my Teutonic background, we wanted to create something with an elegant simplicity — nothing out of place — and we did not want to revive ideas from the 1920s, 30s or 40s."

Mrs. Buttjes served as clerk-of-the-works for house construction. In dialogue with Mr. Lamoureux and associates Lisa Bovell and Byron Tokarchuk, the couple struggled to balance livability with clarity, seeking to avoid the design clichés they saw in too many North Shore houses.

Silhouetted by a mesmerizing view to Lighthouse Park, Vancouver Island and Point Grey, Andrew Buttjes paused mid-tour on their slate-decked perch above the city to sum up the intentions of their Sentinel Hill house, proposing nomenclature of his own: "We like to call this house 'Pacific Rim Contemporary.' "

Whatever label is applied to it, the Buttjes residence is that rare house to reconcile the monumental with the intimate.

The steepness of slope and the resulting size of excavations required extensive retaining walls and other site-works, pulled out to form a concrete frame platform for the whole house. While not apparent in photographs, the house is set the minimum five feet away from property lines on either side, and built to the maximum height and floor area permitted under West Vancouver's building regulations.

 These rules prompted some interesting architectural embellishments. For example, the house's lowest level features the maximum-permitted double garage topped by a low-maintenance green roof, which continues out to top a carport. This roof had to be cut away at the driveway side because the maximum enclosed area had been built-out with the rest of the house. With the textures of its aged barn board formwork showing, the resulting airy bare frame is accentuated with a cantilevered corner, the exposed hood of any vehicle parked within the carport dramatically lit by un-encumbered sunlight from above.

Inside the front door, this same level is home to media room, laundry and mechanical services, plus an extensive guest suite with kitchen, boasting its own deck and highly private light well. "We often host visitors from Germany, so we wanted an autonomous suite here so they could come and go," says Mrs. Buttjes, pointing out the conversation feature-cum-table for this room, one of the two wooden shipping crates that accompanied her husband's family when they immigrated.

An all-birch stair opens uphill views through two-storey-high windows, and is wrapped around one of house's major verticals and roof anchors, a sawn-face concrete block elevator shaft. The second storey features a small bedroom for visiting grandchildren, plus a double master bedroom, connected at front by a shared deck, and at back by a shared shower, lined with a gold-toned travertine. Without prompting, Linda explains the arrangement with characteristic bluntness: "He snores"

Inverted is the word for the main living level, at the top of the house. Inverted in one sense, as the normal sequence of bedrooms above living zones is reversed, and inverted in another sense in that insulation is placed above the roof decking in order to show off the warm tones of the Douglas Fir decking there. With codes severely limiting glass areas lining the tight side-yards, Mr. Lamoureux and team located these to maximum benefit with a ring of clerestory windows — maintaining privacy while ensuring that this is one butterfly (roof) that touches earth lightly.

There are few design distractions here. One is a two-storey column at front where the steel structure is wrapped in a stucco box, then painted — without much success — to look like concrete. Similarly, the darkish stain of horizontal cedar trim used on sidewalls gets lost in the exposed fir, rough concrete, and black-painted steel.

Large West Vancouver houses have tended towards over-elaboration in their designs and details. The same was true of some of Brad Lamoureux's earlier work, but the Buttjes' residence demonstrates new clarity, and fully deserves the Wood Council award.