A heated pool for a single-family home in the wilderness seems particularly decadent and indulgent.
It looks like they wanted a California house, with flat a roof and giant windows, in the Canadian Wilderness. But there's a reason houses in the mountains look the way they do. This house looks as out-of-place as a ski chalet would on the beach in San Diego. In any case, it looks as if they have enough money not to care.
In Pemberton, no less. An outdoor pool, _very_ large windows, open/not-enclosed outdoor patios, etc etc. They've basically planned to heat the outdoors when it is below 0C a few months out of the year; and most of the year it's below 18C. And all that exposed, non-insulated concrete. The thermal mass they have to heat is practically unbounded. Bonkers.
They're going to have a hell of the time with the weathering on that siding and roof in 10y, too.
Edit: I saw someone else building a cabin with similar windows recently. They are double pane, they are just some sort of frameless unit, held together by the strip of black material around the edge. Whether they work probably comes down to how well the installer seals around the edge of the window.
And while the sliding glass doors look like they are single paned, look at the quadruple reflection. Isn't that usually caused by multiple sheets of glass in close proximity?
The external framing is also 2x6, so someone was thinking about insulation. I think it's just that after declaring victory on a well insulated house they then decided to heat the outdoors anyway by directly heating things that are out of doors.
Yes, I'm sure those are at least double pane. Modern windows (especially high end) can be both energy efficient and nice looking. Same goes for their concrete walls--its quite likely that they have insulation in wall cavities or embedded directly in the concrete itself. That being said--I'm sure it still costs a pretty penny to heat in the winter. Its just probably not as bad as you might think.
I knew a person who tried to put in triple-glaze, in New Westminster, BC, and it took a special lien on the property along with special approval from the Province because they weren't allowed by the building codes at the time.
Dang, what makes the west coast so prone to burning? I've lived on the east coast all my life and have never encountered a wild fire. The biggest fires we get are ~1000 acres[1], and easily contained.
The west coast has large tracts of unoccupied, I maintained forest land, and a more Mediterranean climate (wet then much drier).
The two combine into large, periodic forest
Fires.
The east coast has much fewer unbroken tracts of forest, and where it does have them they are more heavily managed and stewarded for a number of reasons.
The east coast was developed and property subdivided/allocated long before the tendency towards large national parks, monuments, etc.
It isn’t that these national parks or forests cause all these problems (though many of them DO feature prominently in these huge fires), they are also a sign of the very different nature of land allocation during the settling of the area.
You can see this pretty clearly if you pull up maps of federal land (national forests, national parks, blm land, etc). Several western states have more land owned by the federal government than anyone else.
I can't believe no one at any step of the process gave them a warning about flat roofs, huge glass windows, having a pool, etc. in frigid mountain areas with tons of snow. I feel like there must be a lot more to this story, like cycling through different architects and engineers until one would finally not tell them the idea was bonkers.
A flat green roof. Which is much worse than just a flat roof.
The drainage will clog and they’ll risk having a leaky roof every spring. And you can’t get up there with a snow shovel because it’s a green roof and you’d scrape off all the dirt and plants.
I wonder if the pool can tolerate freezing solid in the winter, or if it cracks the concrete? Flat roofs might be okay if they're built right. In Oregon, people would look at you funny if you built a house with a flat roof, and yet almost all our commercial buildings have flat roofs, so apparently it works out somehow.
(Oregon has one semi-famous flat-roofed house that I'm aware of, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I suspect FLW hadn't actually ever been to Oregon: it looked like a house that belongs in Arizona or California. Anyways, the eventual owner of the land the house is built on wanted to tear it down and build a mansion, and after much protests they allowed some people to come in and take the house apart and reassemble it near Salem. After putting it back together, they found some of the original contractors who had built the house originally. Supposedly they took a tour of the house and declared that it must have been properly reassembled, because the roof leaks in all the same places.)
> I wonder if the pool can tolerate freezing solid in the winter, or if it cracks the concrete?
A lot of people have inground pools here in Quebec. AFAIK it's just a matter of removing some of the water before it freezes, to minimize the effects of expansion. It does tend to generate small cracks, but nothing that can't be patched over with annual maintenance.
It's also weirdly not mentioned in the article - the lack of any of this type of feedback, especially considering it's about building a home in the Canadian woods.
It looks like they wanted a California house, with flat a roof and giant windows, in the Canadian Wilderness. But there's a reason houses in the mountains look the way they do. This house looks as out-of-place as a ski chalet would on the beach in San Diego. In any case, it looks as if they have enough money not to care.