Home on The Rock

Katja and Adam Thom cabin on exposed postglacial archipelago in Canada windswept Georgian Bay, is more than eight miles from the nearest road. The building is literally on the net and far from the neighboring home to information granite long and thin, perhaps only by boat or seaplane, if you are strong aerial angle.

The region itself is a maze of sandbanks water and pine-covered islands were created by the thick layer of ice that once the northern half of the continent were covered beating. There is, in effect, two kinds of islands here: a network of irregular rocks relatively safe on the shore of lakes and open waters of the Bay Islands. This topography, with its deep scars of a solid phase of planetary history, is a sublime place to locate a summer home.

Adam Thom knows the area well. When he was a boy, he visited with his family almost every summer, the bay, they rent a different car every year, jumping from island to island. Each island was said to Adam, presented his own experience, even jumping on an island feel like a different world. It would make sense, while after he and Katja are married and started a family, they seek refuge in the long twilight of the north.

Adam, a native of Toronto, and Katja, Denmark, met while studying at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles. Both had a background in sculpture and architecture of formal skills and abstract ideas they chose SCI-Arc in all their architectural projects such as Agathom Co., a company co-founder of Toronto is going in eight years.

The cabin of Georgian Bay is a particularly strong articulation of their basic design philosophy. The house is powered only by solar panels, it uses a wastewater system, connected to the house is only autumn, and there is a composting toilet. Heat of the night in his bed with Thoms heated stones beside the wood stove and fireplace and ambient heat they generate keep the house, the temperature within a comfortable range.

Asked about the progress of construction, particularly with regard to the remote site-Adam, laughing. “It was boring,” he said. “Everything had to be put into the boat, and the construction season is very short for time, the boys work on the house -. And then, suddenly, there would be a storm when they could return to their boats. return to their homes for days and could go without doing something. “However, he added, the result is remarkably stable.