Location: Ancaster, ON
Architect: Williamson Williamson Inc.
Date of Completion: 2016

OAA Design Excellence Awards Finalist

An intergenerational home on Ancaster Creek houses a family with their elderly parents, creating an owner-driven solution to the issue of aging in place. The home is designed to allow autonomy for the families while enabling them to benefit from proximity. Conceived as two distinct residences, each forms a linear bar perpendicular to the other, containing the full program of a home. The parents’ suite is laid on an accessible, single-floor apartment with features that accommodate aging challenges

^{Site plan, floor plans, and massing diagrams.
Drawing Credit: Williamson Williamson Inc.}

The front facade. 
Photo Credit: Ben Rahn/A-Frame Inc.

The main residence runs parallel to the creek with the kitchen anchoring the south end of the house. The double-height volume of the kitchen opens the space to the creek, courtyard and the sky. The dining room occupies the glazed link through the front of the house and the landscape to the creek. The extended family shares these common spaces. 

The spiral stair opens as it curls up and marks a path to the parents’ suite. 
Photo Credit: Ben Rahn/A-Frame Inc.

^{The Dining Room link is pinched between two landscapes.
Photo Credit: Ben Rahn/A-Frame Inc.}

The details of the house are done mainly in wood to achieve the inherent warmth, strength, lightness and economy the material provides. With expressive modern spaces connected to the landscape, the home has a cantilevered bedroom, a grand staircase made from structured sheets of laminated plywood and stone cladding to fulfil the owners’ requirements. It feels grand yet intimate with comfortable elements.

The 20’ tall pyramidal ceiling gives the room an unexpected grand proportion and generous daylight.
Photo Credit: Ben Rahn/A-Frame Inc.

^{The library holds a primary view of the conservation lands and can be converted in to a second bedroom.
Photo Credit: Ben Rahn/A-Frame Inc.}

Two generations occupy the same lot and share the same breadth of the landscape—this increases density, but not the building area, thereby reducing the ecological footprint. The design of the intergenerational home rethinks flexibility and speaks about a quality of life that changes the current paradigm of housing elderly persons, allowing a family to age in place.

Exterior at night.
Photo Credit: Ben Rahn/A-Frame Inc.