{"id":116014,"date":"2025-09-03T05:48:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T05:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/116014\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T05:48:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T05:48:10","slug":"with-lantern-house-leckie-studio-creates-a-cloistered-sanctuary-in-a-vancouver-neighborhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/116014\/","title":{"rendered":"With Lantern House, Leckie Studio Creates a Cloistered Sanctuary in a Vancouver Neighborhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clients who want a secluded and contemplative setting for daily life without leaving the city present architects with a significant design challenge, one that requires balancing a house\u2019s inward orientation with its neighborhood contribution. With Lantern House, located in a leafy, semi-urban part of Vancouver, just a few subway stops south of downtown, Leckie Studio Architecture + Design has harnessed this tension to create a project that is both rigorous and richly evocative.<\/p>\n

Those of us with little patience for architecture that turns its back on the public domain will be relieved to realize that, for all its lack of ground-floor windows, Lantern House takes seriously its responsibilities to the street. Yes, the house disregards the formal and compositional conventions of its context, but the architect has assembled the two-story facade\u2019s rough stucco, board-formed concrete, and regionally sourced cedar with a care that elevates these locally common materials and gives the house a strong sense of fit.<\/p>\n

A horizontal division of the building\u2019s single volume\u2014with the upper, glass- and wood-clad section wrapped in a cedar-slat screen\u2014dissolves the structure\u2019s height, so Lantern House reads as shorter\u2014and, in its simplicity, more humble\u2014than its neighbors; at the same time, its symmetry and visually massive ground floor give it a distinctive gravitas.<\/p>\n

The house\u2019s foreground treatment also departs from the neighborhood norm, with informal, textured plantings reminiscent of a forest glade. Among them, three huge roughly hewn blocks of granite complement the architecture\u2019s monumentality and introduce an intermediate scale that connects the house and its ground. In combination with a mature oak in front of the 50-foot lot (wider than the neighborhood\u2019s typical 33-foot lot), the effect is refreshing, like a pocket park along the lawn-lined street.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis vernacular that we see around us is colonialist, so it\u2019s not something that we as a practice feel bound to replicate,\u201d says Michael Leckie, founding principal at Leckie Studio, a 2022 Design Vanguard. \u201cInstead, we opt to respond to context through scale, proportion, and materiality.\u201d With Lantern House, he says, \u201cthe idea is to communicate a sensibility that is less precious, more natural, and, with its acceptance of materials\u2019 weathering, more embracing of a kind of entropic beauty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inside, the house takes a similarly critical approach to domesticity, investigating from first principles the spatial configuration and characteristics that will best support the residents\u2019 daily life. The result is a calm and cloistered set of essential spaces, executed in authentic materials and neutral tones, and washed in soft light. With the wood-framed structure\u2019s footprint measuring just 1,355 square feet, and the front and sides of its nine-square grid occupied by ancillary functions, the interior is smaller and more intimate than photography may convey.<\/p>\n

The entry consists of a two-room sequence: first, a vestibule daylit only by the open door and, second, to the right, an anteroom\u2014\u201cmudroom\u201d seeming too prosaic a term\u2014where sidelight from a narrow window throws a simple bench and lime-washed wall into chiaroscuro. Dark and quiet, this pair of spaces forms an experiential threshold, moderating the sensory transition between the outside world and the sanctuary within.<\/p>\n

A second turn and one arrives at the center of the house, open in plan and subdivided in section. A polished concrete slab on grade steps down the site\u2019s gentle slope, the first level defining a \u201csunken\u201d living room and, the next level, a kitchen zone, behind which full-height glazing opens to the garden beyond. At one end of the kitchen level, a millwork-encased dining alcove with built-in benches and a dropped ceiling forms a spatial eddy that is apart from, and yet still part of, the main space.<\/p>\n

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The slab on grade follows the site\u2019s gentle slope, with the first step down defining the living room (1) and the second the kitchen (2) with an adjacent dining alcove (3). Photos \u00a9 Ema Peter, click to enlarge.<\/p>\n

Above the living room, a 9-foot-square light well, a full story high, bathes the central space in the shifting brightness of the sky. The opening\u2019s wooden-grillwork sides diffuse this illumination and also soften the ground floor\u2019s acoustics, which that level\u2019s predominantly hard and planar surfaces might otherwise have left too bright for comfort.<\/p>\n

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The living room (4) is at the center of the house, directly below the light well (5). Photos \u00a9 Ema Peter<\/p>\n

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From one corner of the living room, a clerestory-lit stair winds up to the second floor, where shadows from the grillwork and refracted light from a rim of mirror beneath the skylight create moments of interest on the lime-washed walls.<\/p>\n

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A stair winds to the second floor (6) from a corner of the living room next to an office (7). A hidden skylight illuminates a tiled shower (8). Photos \u00a9 Ema Peter<\/p>\n

High windowsills provide all three bedrooms with privacy from nearby neighbors, while generous ceiling and door heights give the rooms, though modestly sized, a sense of majesty and calm. Even though the principal bedroom faces the street, the view from the bed consists entirely of a seasonally changing canopy of oak.<\/p>\n

Two bathrooms on this level continue the house\u2019s subtle plays of light and texture. The architect\u2019s appreciation for Jun’ichir\u014d Tanizaki\u2019s essay \u201cIn Praise of Shadows\u201d and Peter Zumthor\u2019s Therme Vals are especially evident in the use of concealed apertures to send whispers of light across the bathing areas\u2019 tiled walls. Details here are representative of the thorough approach throughout, with fine adjustments to wall thicknesses to let tiles remain whole, custom towel hooks aligned within the grout, and door strikes designed in-house to work with the frameless openings.<\/p>\n

\u201cI often suggest to the team that the true merit of a work of architecture should be judged by its worst detail rather than its best,\u201d Leckie says\u2014a level of care that, in Lantern House, has produced a place of coherence and serenity, a sanctuary in the city.<\/p>\n

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Image courtesy Leckie Studio Architecture + Design, click to enlarge.<\/p>\n

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Image courtesy Leckie Studio Architecture + Design, click to enlarge.<\/p>\n

Credits<\/p>\n

Architect:
\n
Leckie Studio Architecture + Design \u2014 Michael Leckie, principal; James Eidse, lead design architect; Emily Dovbniak, project architect; Irena Jenei, Holden Korbin, Andrea Zittlau, designers; Ian Lee, interior designer<\/p>\n

Consultants:
\n
Chalten Engineering (structural); Kontur Geotechnical Consultants (geotechnical); Louis Ngan Land Surveying (surveyor); Integris Project Management + Engineering (building envelope); Monkey Tree Services (arborist); Cyan Horticulture (landscape)<\/p>\n

General Contractor:
\n
Adisa Homes<\/p>\n

Client:
\n
Withheld<\/p>\n

Size:
\n
2,600 square feet<\/p>\n

Cost:
\n
Withheld<\/p>\n

Completion Date:
\n
September 2023<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sources<\/p>\n

Windows:
\n
Aluprof, SwissFineLine<\/p>\n

Solid Surfacing:
\n
Laminam<\/p>\n

Tile:
\n
Stonetile, Ann Sacks<\/p>\n

Lighting:
\n
Nora Lighting, Delta Light, Flos, Bega<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Clients who want a secluded and contemplative setting for daily life without leaving the city present architects with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,903,49,48,356,75,64978,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-116014","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-british-columbia","12":"tag-ca","13":"tag-canada","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-modern-residential-architecture","17":"tag-vancouver"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}