By David Theodore
Photography by Normand Rajotte

To get to Beaulac, you leave the expressway near Sherbrooke for the winding roads of Quebec’s Eastern Townships. The car dips through a landscape that is half recreational playground, half farming community, replete with A-frame houses, antique stores, metal-roofed wooden barns and long vistas of hazy Appalachian mountain ridges. Your destination, a weekend house on the Chemin Brochu, is on the edge of Lake Aylmer, about two hours east of downtown Montreal, midway between the St. Lawrence River and the New Hampshire border.

“We came to this lake in search of good wind for sailing,” says architect Pierre Morency. “We rented for a few years, and I was searching for land around the lake but couldn’t find any for sale. A farmer suggested that his sister might be interested in selling her lot.” He likes to tell the story that his two young sons wanted a spaceship and a tree house. What they got was a bit of both: three 2.5-metre-wide, 13.5-metre-long storage containers placed on a concrete foundation and covered in horizontal hemlock screens that unite the stacked tubes into a coherent whole. The basement holds a utility area, an extra bathroom and a guest room. On the ground floor, the kitchen and dining areas occupy one box and the living rooms another, split by a rough wooden stair leading to three open-plan bedrooms and bathroom in the third container, angled overhead.

Montreal-based Morency has been in practice for 17 years now and planning the year-round cottage gave him a chance to really flex his design muscle. He experimented with prefabrication, using refrigeration containers purchased from the Port of Montreal, modifying them on a vacant city lot to accept wiring, doors, windows and plumbing. He swung a hammer himself, and supervised local craftsmen in Beaulac and Montreal, creating details as the work progressed. Even the third container’s jaunty angle was only decided with the crane operator making small adjustments on site.

Morency’s main concern was to ensure that the black-painted metal boxes remained identifiable yet were subtly transformed into something family friendly and fun for two adults, three kids (the couple also have a young daughter) and a sheepdog. From the entrance, the containers’ brute industrial origin is plain, while on the sides the trellises extend past the edges of the boxes, to give a sense of sculptural movement to the composition. Poised in a stand of maple, spruce and hemlock, the spaceship cantilevers above the sloping site, ready for takeoff.