On Highway 59 to Victoria Beach, there’s a lumber store that sells prefabricated homes and cottages. A big sign proudly declares: “Starting at $49,900.”

“That became the objective,” says Winnipeg architect David Penner. “I thought, I should be able to compete with that.”

Any architect likes a challenge, but this spur to thriftiness happened to connect with Penner’s aesthetic. With economy, simplicity and clever details, the Penner family’s summer retreat is stripped down to bare and beautiful essentials, dissolving the barriers between inside and outside space.

Penner purchased the lot in 2004 and started building in 2005. (He still considers it an ongoing project.) The family—David and wife Marion,
17-year-old son Matthew, 14-year-old daughter
Zoe and Rufus the dog—had always been drawn to Victoria Beach, a resort community about
120 kilometres north of Winnipeg. “We had the advantage of renting in the area for almost 10 years,” explains Penner, “so we knew what worked for us and what didn’t.”

They knew, for instance, that they didn’t need a lot of room, especially with long summer days spent mostly outside. “It’s a beautiful place, especially because of the restricted area,” says Penner, referring to the community’s central streets, which ban cars during July and August. The Penners’ lot is north of this area, so they can drive into their cottage, but that self-propelled ethic lingers. “The roadways are more like paths,” he says. “And we cycle a lot, like everybody at Victoria Beach.” In fact, the family’s bicycles became a factor in the plans:
“I knew we needed a roofed deck for keeping our bikes dry,” says Penner. “The first concept of the design was that big roof.”

The rectangular roof covers 960 square feet,
but only 576 square feet are enclosed. The rest of the area—separated by a three-panel retractable glass door—encompasses a screened room and an open deck.

“The only opaque walls are the bedroom and the bathroom walls. The rest are either a transparent synthetic panel or glass or screen.” Penner cites Philip Johnson’s Glass House as one influence, but admits “you have to make some concessions to family life. It couldn’t be completely open.”

The cottage backs onto a well-used path that runs through a public reserve down to the shores of Lake Winnipeg. Penner has solved the privacy problem with the canny use of vertical louvres. “It’s all in the angles. The closer people on the path get to us, the less they can see. Where the path is the closest, the angle in is at 45 degrees, so it visually shields us while letting in air and light.”

Horizontal louvres keep rain out of the screened area, which is used for dining and lounging. Inside, there’s a kitchen with open fir shelving, and another seating area that centres on a fireplace with a “mantel” made of stacked firewood. The walls of the living area are fir-plywood, clad with strips of wood salvaged from construction and reno sites. Other walls are left unfinished.

The openness of the space is heightened by
the semi-transparent roofing, made of a twin-wall polypropylene that actually seems to hold light. “On overcast days it can seem lighter inside than out,” says Penner. With quicksilver sensitivity to weather, the light inside changes all day long, and at night the structure glows like a lantern in the landscape. “That was something unexpected,” admits Penner. “You can see a halo from the road through the canopy of trees.”

Using a surveyor to figure out how to work with the land and the trees, Penner designed a plan that would minimize disturbance to the site. “We only took out enough bush to do the cottage, and the workmen had to bring everything by hand from the road.”

The entire project is built on a four-foot module (the indoor area is 24 by 24 feet and the screened area and covered deck is 16 by 24), which gives the design a basic visual order. It also means there’s no wasted lumber. Furniture, which includes an EQ3 sofa and some second-hand fibreglass chairs, is basic and flexible, and a lot of the fittings come from the local hardware store.

“One thing that really keeps down costs is the fact that the cottage is for summer use only,” points out Penner. The family is thinking of eventually constructing an outdoor fire pit area and a bunkhouse. “We’re actually thinking of having the bunkhouse as the four-season space, sort of reversing things.”

With intelligent, innovative design, Penner has more or less matched that signboard number that started him thinking. And while his ideas started with cost, the project ended with an idyllic vision of summer living, with nothing to get in the way of the green world outside.