A well-designed cottage deck can help you spend more time outside. Here are three we love

A great deck is so much more than a place to park the barbecue. It’s where you sip your coffee and let the day get away from you, a perfect perch for a spot in the shade with a page-turner, a sheltered view to an epic rainstorm, the headquarters for hours-long board games with the kids. These three well-designed decks capture all these moments and more.

Use the sun and shade

The site on a remote off-grid island in southwestern B.C., was intimately familiar to the homeowners long before they built their cabin: the first summer they purchased the property, they camped here in a canvas-walled tent—its posts made from driftwood pulled off the beach—on a temporary deck platform designed by architect Laura Killam. “They were really into it and wanted to keep that spirit of living outside,” says Killam. “But we wanted to push that even further.”

That meant both embracing and moderating intense summer sunlight with shelter for the most well-used outdoor spaces. “The cabin is up on a bluff, and it’s hot,” says Killam, who worked on the project with interior designer Sophie Burke. “The main social room, the one focused on the ocean view, leads out to a porch, covered because it’s the hottest spot.” The outdoor dining room is just off the main social room, with a forest view, positioned so that late lunches and evenings spent grilling will benefit from late-day sun. “We designed a shade pergola to filter that lower light in the space and into the main room too.”

Surprisingly, there isn’t any shelter where you might expect to see some: on the outdoor bathroom deck at the back of the cabin, which faces the forest. A deep, soaker tub, an outdoor shower, and a basin sink are wide open to the forest (though the closest neighbour is more likely a deer than a peeping Tom). “We had some screening ideas for the shower, but the owners wanted a full immersive experience in nature,” says Killam. “They have a playful spirit.”

Where deck meets rock

There’s a spot on the deck outside of this cabin where the tropical ipe wood is scribed right against the Canadian Shield—as though the billions-year-old stone had crept forward to meet the planks and solidify a relationship of equals, one of the hardest woods meeting the toughest stone.

Of course, it was the other way around in the design process, but that doesn’t make the effect any less romantic.

The owners of this cottage, perched on one of the 30,000 islands that dot Georgian Bay’s eastern shore, recruited architect Andre D’Elia of Toronto-based Superkül to refresh their ’80s getaway. The low-lying design of the addition, which is connected to the main house via a glassed-in breezeway, intentionally reflects the colours of the beautifully rocky Canadian Shield it sits on—with blue-grey stained cedar cladding, a cool metal roof, and that naturally silvered, hard-wearing ipe deck, each space transitioning seamlessly to the next. “In all of our projects, we try to blur that threshold between indoors and out,” says D’Elia. “And part of that is: how do we extend the outdoors?”

The property’s impressive, streamlined deck is the answer to that important question. It surrounds the cottage on three sides, its open design achieved through careful planning. The deck is mostly a short distance from the ground at any point (hence the lack of railing, save for one glass-sided corner), and it occupies nearly the same square footage as the interior. At one point, the space dekes around a weathered jack pine; at another, it integrates some of the rock, creating little natural gardens surrounded by the deck.

This emerging-from-the-landscape design evolved from a very hands-on process. “We did have a topographical survey, but until you’re actually there, it’s hard to know how it will feel,” says D’Elia. “Sometimes we’d think, Let’s raise it up another six inches, or let’s extend it out here, so we can actually work with the rock a little bit better.” The result is a made-for-living outdoor space that feels as natural and timeless as the enduring Shield that surrounds it.

Strategic stairs

This isn’t the kind of deck (right) you can knock off on a sketch pad. “We did so many iterations in 3D,” says architect Heather Dubbeldam of this Catchacoma Lake, Ont., cottage. “It’s pretty big, but we didn’t want it to feel overwhelming.”

This was the second project Dubbeldam and her team at Dubbeldam Architecture and Design had worked on with the homeowners, a family of four from Toronto. The property in the Kawarthas had long been in the family, but the existing cottage had fallen into such disrepair it needed to be rebuilt. “The owners are very close with their siblings and their parents,” says Dubbeldam. There had to be enough room to gather, she says, but, just as importantly, the family wanted spaces for some alone time too. “And the deck was a huge part of that.”

While the new build is in the same location as the old cottage, the design team opted to rebuild lower, without the long, steep staircase that originally connected the old deck with the lakefront. “It wasn’t conducive to integrating indoors and outdoors,” she says. “And we really wanted to try to create multiple spaces where you could just pause and hang out.”

The new deck has a cascading design, which allows for a more gradual transition from the cottage to the water. With wide steps that are mostly limited to three at any one time, no view-blocking guards or handrails are necessary. Three larger gathering zones—an outdoor dining area, a lounge area with soft furniture and a barbecue, and a third seating area where the deck was built around a hundred-year-old white pine—create comfortable spaces for the group to spend time together. And smaller zones, such as a built-in bench, or even the roomy stairs themselves—are perfect for lounging with a book or catching a few early-morning rays.

The deck design also means that, despite the sloped grading of the site itself, the cottage feels integrated into the landscape. “It just makes you feel much more connected to the ground,” says Dubbeldam.

Anicka Quin is the editor-in-chief of Western Living magazine. She wrote about a cabin that includes a place for bats in our Mar/Apr ’24 issue.

This story originally appeared in our June/July ’25 issue.

A well-designed cottage deck can help you spend more time outside. Here are three we love

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Use the sun and shade

Where deck meets rock

Strategic stairs

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