As one of Western Canada's pre-eminent office designers, Jerilyn Wright, head of an eponymous, 15-person interior design firm in Calgary, has designed more than 12 million square feet of commercial office space. Yet her most imaginative work might well be a residential project, the one she designed by and for herself. Every gesture, down to the smallest, seemingly inconsequential detail, was conceived as a response to the unusual site conditions.
The home's elevation and setback was motivated by saving a 50-year-old spruce tree in the front yard. Decks are large enough for entertaining, yet comfortable for a single dweller. The house nestles in the lee of a steep hill, so the upper storey functions as a giant light collector. And all-natural materials reinforce the outside-inside feeling of the house.
For 10 years, Ms. Wright looked for the perfect lot. Then she found "a mice-infested, awful yellow little house," for sale in Calgary that had, as real-estate agents say, location, location, location. The upscale Rideau district, an enclave along the Bow River, sits four minutes from the fine restaurants, wine stores and banking on Fourth Street downtown. One of Calgary's oldest neighbourhoods, it boasts beautifully treed, older homes.
Of her particular lot, Ms. Wright says, "it's all nature. You're convinced you are in the country."
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Trouble was, it was nestled in the lee of a steep hill. She loves sunlight and realized that a one-storey home would be in shadow during the winter months.
To that end, she made her house tall. The second storey functions as a giant light collector — with big skylights and a glass stair landing in the centre — to bestow daylight onto the first floor. The almost complete lack of interior walls, along with the great windowed expanses on all four sides, means there is never a dull moment during daylight hours.
"Light constantly sparkles throughout the house. It's absurd for a house this size to have so many windows," she says of the 102 windows. (She's sure of the figure because she counted them all recently to obtain a window-washing estimate.)
The house is tall and narrow to begin with, but appears even more so because it perches nearly nine feet above grade, atop a series of retaining walls and terraces.
Along with sunlight, Ms. Wright also loves nature. In the front of the year stood a perfect, 50-foot-tall, 50-year-old blue spruce, which she could not bear to cut down. The tree determined the house's height and setback.
"You can't move a tree that size," she says, so she built a retaining wall around it and started her basement above grade to protect the tree's roots. (The spruce is still thriving after all the construction activity.)
The back and one side of the house are forested; the other side had a hedge, but "it wasn't soft enough," she says. So she went to Golden Acres Garden Centre, which registers people who want to have a tree removed but don't want to pay for it. Instead, customers who are looking for mature trees pay for the work. Ms. Wright drove around the city, scouting prospects, and can now boast that with the exception of the blue spruce, "all my trees are throwaways."
In a sense, the landscaping is a bit of recycling, too. After receiving a high quote for landscaping, she decided to do it herself and hired an operator of a mini front-end loader to move rocks around for $50 an hour. "I had trucks and trucks of rock dumped in my yard. My staff and I placed them," she recalls. "None of us had ever done it before. It was such fun."
Finding the perfect sandstone for the fire pit proved more daunting. She looked far and wide until a worker who had helped build her backyard waterfall phoned to say a crew was demolishing part of Calgary's Grace Church, and did she want the perfect sandstone flags they had discovered 30 feet underground?
Although Ms. Wright designed her home as a dwelling for one, she likes to entertain, which explains a bold planning stroke — the front door that opens directly onto the kitchen. Not only do visitors get a sweeping, whammo view of the park-like greenery in back when they arrive, they enter right into the heart of the home.
"That's the core experience I wanted people to have when they walk in. The cooking smells, the coffee brewing — it generates hospitality."
The kitchen cabinetry floats on eight-inch-high, stainless-steel legs. This gives a lighter look, makes the room seem bigger and enables her to get closer to the counter. Ms. Wright, who stands five-foot-eight, says she doesn't have to bend over as much and her back feels better. "I don't want kitchen cabinets banging down to the floor. Even with a toe kick, your whole foot doesn't get to go under the counter."
To ensure even less bending, she made the counter tops two inches higher than the norm. And in keeping with the interior theme of opening up to the landscape, the low-lying cabinetry is veneered in black ebony, metaphorical tree trunks rising from the dark polished granite floor. The granite countertop is metaphorical soil (its reflective surface also amplifies the precious daylight). The upper wall and ceiling areas are painted in a taupe grey-green (metaphorical leafy crowns).
Referring to the ebony's vein-like grain pattern, Ms. Wright says, "The whole counter front and top looks like a layer of topsoil and the roots under it. You look over it to see the greenery. ... If the counters were made of a light wood, paint, laminate or Corian, it would fight against the outside because this composition is just the base. It solidifies the view of the landscape with the waterfall."
Her home feels comfortable whether she hosts two people or 100, particularly in warm weather, when guests can spill out onto the deck. The deck's plan echoes the piano curves of the roof profile on the house. Those curves, as well as the shapes of the compound windows, were inspired by one of her favourite architects, Swiss master Le Corbusier.
However, he usually finished his houses in white stucco, which to Ms. Wright's taste looks too hard-edged (and eventually starts to look dirty). She had her heart set on stone, even though Calgary has always been a wood-and-stucco town. In her plan for natural materials inside and enhanced natural landscape outside, the cladding was intended to read as tree bark.
But her structural engineer advised against hanging stone cladding on the tall, narrow house. In a conventional house, internal cross-members act as shear walls that resist wind forces, but hers was an open plan. Unless she added heavy steel bracing to the structure, a strong wind pushing against the heavy stone might twist the house to the point of collapse.
Ms. Wright dug in her heels. "I wanted rock, so I just found a way to have it," she says of the faux ledge rock she finally settled on.
To create the illusion of genuine rock, she had the workers install the pieces unevenly instead of flush, pulling some of the pieces forward to create a play of shadows and texture. She would go out at night to check a recently completed section of wall, shining a light on it to make sure it cast long, interesting shadows. She's delighted with the results: "You can't tell it's not real."
Special to The Globe and Mail
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