It started as many great adventures now do—with a flyover on Google Earth. As an avid surfer, Kamil Bialous might have been doing reconnaissance on a new surf break. But this time, his interest wasn’t in the water. He and his partner, Urszula Lipsztajn, had long been scouting for a plot on which to build a pied-à-terre (a pied-à-mer, really) near one of Canada’s premier surf destinations, Tofino, B.C.

Something he hadn’t noticed before had caught his eye, and he’d peered closer at his screen. “What are these forested lots here?” Over their six years of looking, their search had spread out to Ucluelet. Tofino and Ucluelet sit at opposite ends of about 40 prime kilometres of Vancouver Island’s west coast, each town at the tips of a section shaped roughly like a deck cleat on a boat. Instead of the open ocean side, this plot was tucked into a bay at the base of the southerly isthmus on which Ucluelet perches. To ground-truth his findings, Kamil and Urszula traveled from their home in Squamish, more than 200 km away by a straight line on Google Earth—but six hours of travel, including a ferry ride, in the real world. Also not as straightforward as it appeared virtually: the lot.

Their realtor had instructed them to show up at low tide and wear their gum boots. Sloshing in along the coastline, they found a gap in the biomass that grew right to the high-tide line. They waded in through thick brush, scrabbled over stumps and fallen timber, crawled under deadfall. “Probably why no one touched it,” says Kamil now. “It was so gnar.” But his gut reaction was immediate: “This is so sick. This is the one.” Urszula’s first thought was, “Really?” That was January 2018, and the couple—who had met in Toronto back in 2004—had been on something of an inexorable path to that moment. They had both grown up in Ontario, but their proclivities already had them marked out as future Left Coasters.

Kam, now a freelance photographer, and Urszula, a leadership coach, met working at that great Canadian bastion of everything outdoors, MEC. A recreational kayaker and cross-country skier, Urszula was destined to go deep into yoga and meditation. Kam’s main focus at the time was rock climbing, but in 2000, he’d made a pilgrimage out to Tofino and spent two weeks learning to surf.

They moved to Vancouver in 2010 and spent 90 per cent of their vacation time in Tofino. In the winter of 2012, they visited a friend’s tiny cabin there so that Urszula could sit at the feet of a local yoga teacher who had a cult-like following. Coincidentally, the yoga instructor’s husband had been the one who had taught Kamil to surf a dozen years earlier. Urszula would get up at 4:30 a.m. to endure the cold-water outdoor shower before starting her prescribed morning regimen of meditation, followed by a day of yoga.

Meanwhile, Kam went out every day with his board, regardless of the conditions, getting his own cold-water immersion in the salty waters of the Pacific. It was then that they thought about what it might be like to live there full-time.

They got a realtor, and though the market had yet to rise like boats on a king tide, none of the offers they put in went through. A couple of years later, they instead moved from their 600 sq. ft. rental in East Vancouver to a house they’d bought in Squamish, next to a friend’s. The next year, property markets continued their relentless climb skyward, their house doubled in value, and the dream of finding a place of their own on the coast continued to percolate. “We were trying to navigate how we could live in nature and surf for the rest of our lives,” says Kamil, of those intervening years. “We felt very drawn to living on the ocean.” And now, six years later, this gnarly chunk of coastal rainforest seemed like just the opportunity they’d been looking for. The owner was the son of the logger who had bought the lot, left it fallow, and habitually asked for more than any offer that came his way. In March 2018, Urszula and Kam’s realtor managed to negotiate a deal, and, leveraging against the equity in their Squamish home, their dream of a surf shack was set to become reality.

One of those who had put in offers on the land over the years was the immediate neighbour to the west, Vaida Siga. Vaida had arrived in the mid-’70s to work as a nurse in the hospital, back when Tofino was still a rough resource town populated by what she’d characterize as “loggers, fishers, and feds.” She met her husband, Harvey, a logger, and in ’81 they’d moved into an instant subdivision created by his employer, Millstream Timber.

The company had barged in reclaimed houses from the Vancouver airport expansion to a muddy clear-cut at the end of Ucluelet Inlet for their workers to buy. Over 40 years later, Vaida recalls the landscape architecture being akin to that of a barnyard. “Yeah, it was ugly. And if you can imagine loggers putting in septic and water systems,” she says, “that’s what we got.” Looking out her front window at that time, there were only three trees left standing in the distance and a vast mudflat.

Over the decades, the area gentrified. Driving through now, it has the feel of a lawny suburban neighbourhood, a basketball hoop in the driveway, maybe a covered RV or boat trailer. The 50-home subdivision of loggers saw more fishers and feds (principally Coast Guard), but in the last decade or so, Vaida has noticed a new breed of owner moving in, what she describes as “this beautiful mix of young people, looking for a better life.”

Two high school teachers now live across the road, while another neighbour is an adventure photographer. In both Tofino and Ucluelet, the fish-and-sticks economy has largely given way to tourism. And like everywhere else it seemed, the most valuable commodity became dirt. Vaida still recalls when, back in the late ’70s, a local doctor was selling five-acre oceanfront lots on Chesterman Beach for $18,000 ($16,000 for lots inland). Today, a home on a half-acre at Chestermans might list at around $5 million. When she found out the lot to her east had sold, “I was terrified it was going to be a developer.”

In the spring of 2018, Kamil and Urszula became the owners of a 2.73-acre chunk of raw land, which had benefited from nature’s impressive capacity to heal from the carnage of clear-cutting. The understory still held the jumble of fallen giants, root balls belly-up amidst torn earth, like the mossed-over wreckage of a battlefield. Slim hemlocks reached for the canopy to compete with the few remaining monumental red cedars. The rawness was daunting. Plus, though the two had renovated their home in Squamish, they’d never built anything from scratch before. “We went in blind,” says Urszula. But they also came in with ideals they wanted to live by.

More than 60 years earlier, and about 2,000 kilometres south, an architect and developer named Al Boeke made a reconnaissance flight of his own. Pre-Google Earth, he’d made a journey by small aircraft over a rugged stretch of California coast a few hours drive north of San Francisco. He’d bought a sprawling ranch on land once inhabited by the Pomo Indians but had since been heavily logged and grazed by sheep. His intention was to turn it into a community that might build in harmony with nature and each other. Bringing together some of the leading ecologically conscious architects and designers of the time, the result was the celebrated community, Sea Ranch.

Kamil had learned about Sea Ranch years before, through his work shooting for design magazines. Their philosophy, “Nature predominates,” resonated with him, and though he and Urszula had no explicit manifesto, theirs would have been identical in spirit. Through some parallel kismet, in late 2018, just as they began site prep on their land, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art launched a retrospective to celebrate the ’60s development. The museum described Sea Ranch as “a progressive, inclusive community, guided by the idealistic principles of good design, economy of space, and harmony with the natural environment.”

Like other seasonal cabin folks, they might have flattened out the vegetation to their liking and created something like the ostentatious structures going up around Tofino But with their commitment to living lightly with this place and its people, they, like Boeke, assembled a team of like-minded folks to build towards their long-term vision for the land, and hopefully, their future retirement home. Once they’d bought the property, the first order of business was to find a designer. They chose local home designer, Jennifer Price-Francis, the owner of Nectar Design. She had grown up in the Pacific Northwest and had spent a lot of time on sailboats, an ideal background for designing their initial foray: a highly efficient, 500-sq.-ft. cabin nestled in a wet environment with little in the way of level ground.

Also instrumental to their efforts were lifelong locals, Dave Edwards and his daughter, Jill. Ostensibly acting as remarkably capable excavator operators, Dave in particular brought with him a refined sense of what it means to respect the land. A local surveyor had tagged every tree on the property greater than 30 cm in diameter, a standard process in the area. Though Dave was a former logger, he had such a light touch that it was thanks to him that so many of the trees remained. (“Although he also said, ‘You’ve got to stop that’ when I cried over every tree that was cut down,” says Urszula.)

In December of 2018, walking along with a small chainsaw to clip at the undergrowth, Dave selected the least impactful path for a driveway through the property from where the paved road ended to the eventual building site. Much to the vexation of future tradespeople, among the features he chose to preserve was a pair of old-growth-stumps-turned-nurse logs that act as a natural gateway to the site. Even with the side of one stump shaved down, trucks needed to do a 30-degree pivot to get through the gap, and the crane truck couldn’t make it through at all.

The other integral member of their team was the builder, Steve Chan, the owner of Carmanah Projects. Originally adamant that they would hire locally, the couple quickly discovered that all the builders nearby were already too busy. Steve was based in Nanaimo, a two-and-a-half-hour drive away. But as it turned out, the match was ideal. “Everybody on our crew enjoys the coast,” says Steve, “and enjoys surfing.” Steve and his young team (Steve being the oldest, in his early 30s at the time) would come down for four days each week, five guys living in a trailer on the lot, and put in 10-hour days. With that kind of schedule, there wouldn’t appear to be much time for surfing. “Definitely not as much as we had hoped for,” laughs Steve now, “especially in the winter when your daylight hours are limited to working. But in the summer, we would take off and cook dinner on the beach and catch some waves.”

“That’s the benefit of working on the coast,” says Jennifer. “I’d show up for walkthroughs, and they’d have all their surfboards and wetsuits hanging up.” But it wasn’t all sunshine and clean lefts. “It’s the West Coast, deep in a rainforest, so tons of rain, tons of mud,” says Steve. Near-freezing rain is to be expected out on the coast in winter, but the crew also toiled through historic heat waves and wildfire smoke in the summer, and of course, when they started in August 2020, they faced the chaos and uncertainty of a global pandemic. But somehow, a year later, Kamil and Urszula were stacking new dishes on the kitchen shelves—which is to gloss over everything in between: the supply chain issues, delays, and cost increases, the dearth of local trades, and one aspect of respecting the natural environment that they had not entirely foreseen.

T he Cascadia fault line runs all along the coast, from Northern California past the northern tip of Vancouver Island, lurking deep beneath the ocean, more than a hundred kilometres offshore. With the ever-present threat of a mega-quake, a tsunami of post-biblical proportions would be the second rider of that particular apocalypse. Though its presence was only discovered in the last 50 years, it’s now known that in 1700, there was an earthquake here strong enough to send a tsunami to the shores of Japan. Among the local Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations, oral storytelling traditions have accounts of tsunamis, one massive event washing away an entire village, with not a single survivor.

Though the name of the local Ucluelet band Yuu-tluth-aht Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ people translates into “dwellers of the protected place inside,” the cabin’s position tucked at the head of a narrow inlet only means that the funneled mass of a tsunami would gather more power.

Kam and Urszula’s geotechnical engineering report came in just as their site prep was about done. Required by the district office in Port Alberni (which itself is at the end of an inlet and was hit by a four-metre tsunami in 1964), the geotech report is part of a long, unpredictable process meant to ensure that new builds account for, among other things, possible floods, and tsunamis. Theirs came back with the news that they needed to raise the cabin more than two metres higher than what they’d anticipated, to almost nine metres above sea level.

The exact siting for the cabin had already shifted 20 or 30 times by micro-increments to avoid hitting major tree roots and to achieve the effect of having the cabin nestle into the landscape. But now, as they prepared to pour a foundation, all that careful consideration was washed away, and they feared the cabin would now be left standing proud, like a lighthouse. “Our initial reaction was disappointment,” recalls Kamil. “We thought, Damn, it’s going to be this big, obtrusive thing.” They sought the opinion of an authority in earth sciences, a university professor and emeritus scientist of the Geological Survey of Canada, who, having studied the area, felt four metres would be sufficient. But the district stuck with the geotech report. The couple had no choice but to re-sculpt the land itself.

With a massive amount of infill, and about a 10 per cent jump in cost, they still achieved what they’d set out to accomplish. The geotech report stipulated the specifications of the sand and gravel needed directly around the foundation. But then Dave, Jill, and Kamil carefully redistributed natural material—fallen logs, gravel, soil—to level the ground and blend the cabin back into the landscape, taking great pains to re-wild by hand what they’d disturbed with relocated cedar saplings and ferns. “They are one of the few clients that I’ve worked with who wanted to preserve the land in the state that it was in when they purchased it,” says Jennifer. “They committed to it, they stuck to it, and they really succeeded in keeping the site natural.”

What also can’t be seen is Kamil and Urszula’s efforts to give back to their new community. The type of folks who will collect garbage when they walk on the beach, the couple contributes a portion of their rental income to local environmental or social justice organizations, such as Redd Fish Restoration Society and Raven Trust. They hope to grow old here, to perhaps have their mothers, both widows, come join them from Ontario. “The joke is that they would live together,” says Urszula, “and hang out with Vaida.” They themselves spend a lot of time with Vaida, Urszula’s new best friend, playing crib through the winter or paddling in the inlet during the still days of summer.

Now into their third season of enjoying their foothold on the coast, Urszula and Kamil’s aerial reconnaissance tends more towards sending up a drone to see if nearby Kennedy Lake is clear of coastal fog for a balmy, freshwater swim. They need only hear the sea lions braying from a local colony to know that the wind’s blowing easterly and they’d better do a surf check. Despite the apparent goal of just being closer to the surf, that’s really not it. “I don’t want to sound like a hippie,” says Kamil, “but it’s really about time in nature.” Whether out on the water or tucked in their rainforest sanctuary, their intention remains outward connection and inner calm. Fittingly, they’ve named their own personal Sea Ranch, The Peace Cabin.

Masa Takei is based in Vancouver, B.C. He first met Kamil when they worked together on “Haida Gwaii Scavengers & the Neoprene Handshake,” in our Winter ’16 issue.