Foul Weather Is No Match for This Boxy New Brunswick Home—or the Steel Stair Wrapped Around It

Architect Peter Braithwaite isn’t deterred by harsh weather. In fact, he says "it’s part of the charm" of living and working in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where windy and wet conditions batter fishing houses and residences that dot the craggy coastline.

With his eponymous design-build firm, Braithwaite has crafted his share of dwellings in the region, all of which feel as if they’ve been dropped in nature, but are built "so they don’t blow away in the wind," he says. The first time he visited the site for his latest clients’ home on the shores of Bathurst, New Brunswick, "the rain came in horizontally," he recalls.

His clients, a young couple who were keen to build a year-round residence, wanted to be able to host and drink in expansive coastline views over Chaleur Bay, an area within the Gulf of St. Lawrence. "The location was ruggedly beautiful, and the clients’ ambitions seemed both appropriate to the waterfront location and challenging enough to pique our interest," Braithwaite says. From the start, connecting their lifestyle to the coastal landscape and climate was the design’s driving force.

With the clients acting as builder on the project, Braithwaite designed a cedar-clad box with generous windows on the first and second levels that run almost the length of the facade and wrap around slightly at its north and east corners. Known as The Sandbox—"it’s literally a box on the sand," Braithwaite explains—the waterfront home has a commanding presence among its low-slung gable-roofed neighbors.

For the vertical cladding, Braithwaite chose a knotty Eastern cedar. Before being installed, the planks were hand-dipped in a mixture of water and LifeTime, a natural powder that helps preserve the wood while hastening its patina. "When cedar first goes up, if it’s not treated in this manner, it has a lot of red and yellow hues that aren’t really a part of the vernacular," Braithwaite says. "Over time," he explains, "it turns this beautiful silvery gray. The preservative expedites that process. It makes it fit into its location more quickly." Today, the cedar planks reflect the exteriors of the area’s fishing buildings, or the weather-beaten shingles of coastal homes in nearby Maine.