Touch Wood

On a sylvan stretch of Canadian coast, an experimental house by designer Omer Arbel goes against the grain

- CAROLINE ROUX

The Vancouver-based designer Omer Arbel doesn't give his projects names; he prefers numbers, based on their order of completion. This means that 2.4 is a striped resin chair that he created in 2003, and 84 is a glass-bubble light, lined in copper mesh, developed in 2016. A rather more recent completion is 91, a family holiday house hiding in a forest on an island off the coast of the British Columbian city. The husband-and-wife owners moved in last year.

Clad in heavy end-grain cedar blocks, sandblasted to a muted and almost rocklike finish, the house disappears into its landscape of trees. At night the home glows like a lantern among the branches. But the real tour de force is how Arbel has used the site. Although the piece of land has 500 feet of waterfront, he chose not to hug the house along the shore but to orient its footprint perpendicular to the coast, straddling a gully. Visitors enter down a long corridor, with intriguing little rooms to one side, and into a handsome living space before they see the sea.