Georgeville and Georgeville. Those are the answers to the where and why of the story behind this cottage. Georgeville—a charming village on the shores of Lake Memphremagog in Quebec’s Eastern Townships—also happens to be a big part of how it all happened.
Leigh Partington and her husband, Mark Smith, built their modern-yet-uncompromisingly-comfortable 900-sq.-ft. cabin on a sprawling piece of land that had belonged to Leigh’s aunt Mary on her dad’s side. But that’s just the start. Leigh grew up here, and the Partingtons have been around almost as long as Georgeville itself. There’s a street named after them, and Leigh’s dad and grandfather, owners of a local construction company, have built about 80 homes in the area.
Mark first fell in love with Georgeville when he worked as a teen at nearby Camp Wilvaken. A few years later, he fell in love with Leigh, after she applied for a job in an outdoors shop where he worked, and he spotted her hometown on her resumé. “She loved the outdoors and everything that comes out of her mouth is funny,” says Mark. “So Georgeville is the heart and the catalyst of many things.”
The couple lives in Montreal, but, right from the start of their relationship, they ended up in Georgeville often. “We would go and visit Leigh’s family as much as we could,” says Mark. They spent many weekends skiing, snowshoeing, hiking, and cycling on aunt Mary’s property. And when they got married in 2014, their ceremony was held on that land, under an arch built by Leigh’s dad.
In 2020, when Mary started talking about selling off part of her property, Leigh and Mark expressed their respectful and extremely keen interest. “She came back to us and said, ‘I’d love for you guys to have part of it,’ ” says Mark. “She wanted to keep the family together.”
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The land they acquired that September has a spectacular, can-you-believe-this-view? kind of view: meadow, birches, pines, Mount Elephantus on the opposite side of Lake Memphremagog, and a massive swath of sky. But the couple kept their initial building aspirations modest. A container home would suit them fine…at least temporarily. Right?
“It’s minus 20 outside, you’ve just come from cross-country skiing for two hours, and you don’t have running water. My wife was not having any of it,” says Mark, of the 20-by-7-foot tiny house that they finished building in March of 2021. “The second we finished the container home, we started designing the new cottage.”
Enter Leigh’s builder dad, David. “It was nice to experience what my dad has done his whole life and what my grandfather did as well,” says Leigh. “It meant a lot to connect with him in that way.”
“You could tell David loved showing his daughter everything he knew about building,” adds Mark.
Working within their budget of $150,000, the trio got together to hash out a plan. It was what diplomats might call a highly collaborative process. Leigh, a high school math teacher, brought her pragmatism and sense of how she wanted to live in the space. Mark, a marketing director, brought his Scandinavian-inspired sensibilities and drive to make things beautiful. And David brought his 50 years of know-how and staunchly candid approach.
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“I read a lot of Dwell,” says Mark. Early on in the planning, he proposed a cottage consisting of multiple cubes connected by glass passageways. David quickly brought them back to reality. “He said, ‘When you win the lottery, let me know,’ ” says Mark. But they did find another solution to add some “funk”: dividing the cottage into two cubes that connect directly, sans glass passageways. After lots of backing and forthing—about room sizes, layouts, storage, and how many bathrooms is the right number of bathrooms—David sketched out the plans on quad paper, obtained the necessary permits, and got to work on manifesting Mark and Leigh’s two-bedroom, one-bathroom cottage. (For the record, David still strongly believes that a second bathroom is non-negotiable.)
David and his friend Jim would work on the build during the week, and the couple spent their weekends on the tasks David set for them.
“That’s how we spent our weekends for the better part of a year,” says Mark. “Taping things, sweeping up, nailing a million nails.”
The siding they chose also required a hefty investment of physical labour. They had their sights set on simple, vertical wood slats with a Japanese burnt-wood look (known as yakisugi). When they found the cost of pre-treated wood too high, they improvised another option for a quarter of the price: using Lifetime Wood Treatment, a non-toxic preservative used in some of Canada’s National Parks that leaves no residue.
“We stained every side of every piece of wood you see on the cottage by hand,” recalls Mark.
“I thought using paintbrushes would be faster and require less stain. I was wrong!” Leigh says.
“It took us four weekends. And then, right after, we watched some guy on Instagram build a bath for the stain and just dip the slats in. I think it took him a day,” says Mark.
In addition to finding ways to keep costs down, the couple was committed to minimizing the environmental footprint of their build. That meant that David added a little extra insulation, more than what was required by code. By the time the cottage was complete in December 2021, it required minimal electric heat—the extra insulation helps keep the cabin warm in winter and cool in summer. “When it’s minus 30 outside, it can be 27°C inside,” says Mark. “It’s somewhat of a passive house.”
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For the decor, Mark and Leigh repurposed materials wherever possible: the kitchen counter is made of excess wood flooring from a friend’s reno, and the William Morris fabric that covers their lower cabinets was given to them by a second cousin.
“The goal was to try to buy as little as possible. Or to buy second-hand as much as we could,” says Leigh. The bunk beds in the guest bedroom are from Leigh’s
childhood room. They belonged to her mom before that and still bear the graffitied inscriptions of youth. The bench at their kitchen table was a Facebook Marketplace find, and the wardrobe in the guest bedroom is from Mark’s parents.
“We kept coming back to the word patina,” says Leigh. “That was really the theme for our project: how do we make this feel lived in? We didn’t want anything too precious. We wanted things that meant something to us, that have a history.”
Looking back, Leigh compares building the cottage to building a relationship. “Sometimes you disagree,” she says. But the negotiation of those decisions is what helped them create a cottage that reflects them both.
“We always met in the middle and made something that’s aesthetically pleasing and practical,” says Mark.
“Though we could have more storage,” says Leigh.
Dominique Ritter is a writer and an editor who lives in Quebec’s Laurentians.
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