Sneak peek into Ian MacDonald’s eco-friendly cabin

In the living-dining room at their Go Home Bay, Ont., cottage, Ian MacDonald and Diane MacDiarmid can enjoy a meal with a breeze when the 42 feet of windows facing the water are open to the screens.

When they need heat, the concrete slab wall absorbs and radiates warmth from the two woodstoves within it.

Ian designed the whole cottage with efficiency in mind, and the look—a simple box framed in rough-sawn fir—lends itself to peaceful weekends outside the city.

The view from the dock to the cottage includes the woodpile. “One big dead pine would take you through the year,” says Ian.

On his roof, Ian can see three eco-friendly features: the roof itself, irrigated and planted with sedum, but evolving with local grasses blown in; the high clerestory windows, facing east, that allow breezes that come into the cottage on the western side to move in a gentle S-curve, up and out; and rolling shades in the long tube above the windows.

The cottage’s only bathroom, situated between all three bedrooms, gets natural light through the clerestories.

The master bedroom also receives light through the clerestories above.

The low ceiling beams in the living-dining room direct your attention to the outside, and the view gives the impression that the cottage is floating. That’s deliberate, says the architect. He wants the viewer to have a strong sense of the scale of the landscape.

The kitchen saves space by doubling as a corridor through the cottage, with a reading nook, warmed by the third woodstove, at one end.

The sunshades, along the eastern side of the cottage, keep out about 90 per cent of radiant energy, great for hot, sunny summer days, says Ian.