A Cedar-Shingled Quebec Forest House Built as a Base Camp for Living

From a drone, La Maraude looks almost like it grew there. Three pale gabled volumes nestle into a snow-covered clearing in the Outaouais forest, their natural cedar shingles reading warmer than the birch trunks around them, their steep metal roofs already shedding the season’s accumulation. It is a house that earns its site rather than announcing itself on it.

The Project

La Maraude 4c39d37d 03c7 4298 8c65 B39263c41f68 is a residential project by Montreal-based Nathalie Thibodeau architecte, completed on a large forested property along the Maskinonge River in the Outaouais region of Quebec. The brief was specific: integrate a family home into the forest without displacing it toward the riverbank, and establish it as the anchor point for a broader network of smaller retreat spaces distributed across the site. Each family member, the thinking went, would eventually claim their own pocket of the land. The house is the first and central node.

The design takes its cues directly from Quebec vernacular architecture — simple rectangular volumes, steep gable roofs engineered to shed snow, and a sequencing of outbuildings with slightly varied orientations that mirrors the logic of traditional Quebec farmstead compounds. The exterior material palette is deliberately limited and deliberate: natural cedar shingles supplied by SBC Cedar wrap the walls continuously, and a standing-seam metal roof caps each volume. Both materials are chosen as much for longevity and climate performance as for their visual resonance with the regional building tradition.

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The Spaces

The Entry Pavilion

The smallest of the three volumes handles arrival and service. Its massing is compact and intentionally understated — a single gabled form clad in the same natural cedar shingles as the rest of the complex, with a narrow grey door set flush into the wall and a small square window punched into the upper gable. There is no grand porch or ceremonial entry sequence. Instead, the transition from outside to inside is compressed and quiet, designed to make the larger spaces that follow feel earned. The entry hall holds a focused opening to the exterior, a single framed view that orients you before you move deeper into the house.

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The Living Pavilion

The central and largest volume is where the spatial generosity opens up. High ceilings and floor-to-ceiling glazed panels on the south face pull light deep into the plan, and the interior photograph makes the logic immediately legible: polished concrete floors, white plaster walls, and an olive-green corduroy sofa anchored beside a flush black wood-burning insert. To the left, a full-height sliding glass wall frames a winter view directly into the cedar shingles of the adjacent pavilion and the snow-covered forest beyond. Through the opening between volumes, you can see light oak millwork by La Cime Ebenisterie rising toward the upper level of the bedroom wing, and a doorway to yet another bright corridor beyond. The effect is of transparency through the whole building — a lit axis from the forest outside to the forest on the other side.

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The Bedroom Pavilion and Site Connection

The third pavilion steps back from the public zone of the house and sits more privately within the topography. Built across two levels to follow the slope of the site, its windows are smaller and more deliberately placed than those of the living volume — each one framing a specific tree canopy or hillside rather than offering a wide panoramic read. The exterior sequence between the living pavilion and the bedroom wing, captured in the ground-level photography, shows the two cedar volumes in close conversation: a sliding glass terrace door opening onto a snow-packed path between them, a small square window above, and the forest pressing in close on all sides. A figure in a blue jacket walks the path between, which is about as accurate an image of the intended life here as any floor plan could convey.

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What you might carry home

The most transferable idea from La Maraude is also the most counterintuitive one: restraint in window placement is a design move, not a budget cut. The bedroom pavilion uses small, carefully positioned windows rather than expansive glazing, and the result is that each view feels curated rather than incidental. If you have a room that currently looks out onto something unremarkable, a smaller window repositioned to frame one specific tree, roofline, or patch of sky will do more for the quality of that room than a larger one ever could.

The two-material exterior — cedar shingles on the walls, standing-seam metal on the roof — is worth sitting with too. Both materials are visually quiet individually, but together they create enough tonal and textural contrast to read as a considered palette rather than a default one. If you are working on an exterior and feeling stuck between options, asking which two materials carry the most heritage logic for your region is a more grounding question than asking which ones are trending.

The idea of the house as base camp, with smaller retreat spaces planned across the site over time, is something that scales down usefully even for a suburban lot. You do not need forest acreage to think in terms of a primary gathering space and a secondary one — a reading nook in a separate corner, a garden shed with a chair in it, a screened porch that feels genuinely apart from the main house. The psychological effect of having a place to go to within your own property is real, and La Maraude makes the case for planning those smaller nodes intentionally rather than arriving at them by accident.

Finally, the polished concrete floor paired with white plaster walls and warm wood millwork in the living pavilion shows how a material sequence can hold temperature without relying on color. The room reads warm because of the wood tones and the fireplace glow, not because anything was painted amber or terracotta. If you want a room to feel grounded and cozy, material warmth and light warmth are doing more work than wall color in most cases.

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La Maraude is a patient project. It does not try to resolve everything at once — the site will keep accumulating meaning as new retreat spaces are added over the years, and the house itself will silver and settle further into the forest as the cedar weathers. Nathalie Thibodeau architecte built something that knows how to wait, and there is genuine craft in that.

Georgia

I'm Georgia, an interior writer covering interior design and home decor across its full range — color and texture, layout and lighting, small-space fixes and seasonal styling. One standard runs through all of it: every idea has to hold up in a real home, not just a photograph.