Georgia 
At dusk, the Laurentian Forest House reads as a series of glowing volumes tucked into the ferns and rock faces of a Quebec mountainside. The warm amber light pushing through its stacked levels and the sharp A-shaped gables cutting against the treeline make it clear, even from a distance, that this house was placed here deliberately — not imposed on the land but negotiated with it.
The Project
The Laurentian Forest House is a residential project by Luc Plante architecture + design, a Montreal-area firm practicing since 2002 whose work is grounded in dialogue with clients and careful integration into each site. The design team — Luc Plante, Caroline Desbiens, and Kim My Le Quoc — was given a site that descends sharply through the Laurentian forest, with exposed bedrock, mature trees, and views across the Eastern Townships landscape. The structural work was handled by St-Georges structures et civil, while Les Paysages Verduroy shaped the grounds. Photography is by Annie Fafard and Sarah Dagenais.
The concept the team landed on was precise: let the house follow the hillside the way water does, level by level, rather than cut a platform into the slope. Each floor steps down to meet the contours of the land, and two separate access paths — one arriving at the upper floor through a covered carport, another winding discreetly through the woods to a lower entrance — make the journey to the front door feel like part of the experience. The architecture is described as both contemporary and classic: symmetrical facades, A-shaped and triangular forms used consistently throughout, and massive columns anchoring the whole thing solidly to the site.
SaveThe Spaces
The Carport Facade at Dusk
Approaching from the upper access path, the carport-level facade is the first full read of the house. The standing-seam metal roof stretches wide over a flat covered parking area supported by pale square columns. Behind it, the peaked gables rise into the last light of the sky, and you can already see through to the kitchen-level glazing. The stone base is present here too, giving the whole composition weight at grade while the roof lines stay crisp and geometric above.
SaveThe Terrace and Upper Facade
The outdoor terrace off the common floor extends the living space into the open air. This angle of the house shows the natural wood slatted columns and railings that frame the terrace, set against the stacked stone cladding of the mid-level. The A-frame peaks above are doubled here — two gables stepping slightly apart — with the metal roof planes meeting at precise angles. Conifer plantings below and a clear view toward the horizon make this terrace genuinely useful for both relaxed evenings and broader views of the surrounding landscape.
SaveThe Forest-Facing Elevation
From among the trees on the downhill side, the house presents its most layered face. Three distinct levels are readable: the glazed gable at the top, the wide band of windows in the middle that serves the main living floor, and the stone-clad lower level with its own glazed openings. This is where the waterfall metaphor earns its keep — the eye drops naturally from one level to the next, following the slope of the hill. Boulder outcroppings and native ferns have been left essentially undisturbed at the base.
SaveThe Downhill Garden Elevation
Standing a little further into the woods and looking back uphill, the proportions of the house become even clearer. The stone base is deep and substantial, the upper glass volume sits confidently above it, and the tree canopy frames the whole composition naturally. A small plunge pool or hot tub is visible in the lower right of the garden, set into a stone-paved terrace with boulder edging — an extension of the landscape architect’s work integrating the site’s existing rock into the hardscape.
SaveThe Rear Garden and Plunge Pool
The rear elevation, seen from the garden level, shows the full height of the house against a clear sky. The upper volume here is clad in pale panels rather than stone, the glass balcony railing catching the afternoon light above the stone column. Flat stone steps descend from the house toward the small plunge pool, with boulders and low plantings of ferns and ornamental grasses filling the gaps. Adirondack chairs and a steel fire basket on the paving confirm this is a terrace meant for actual use, not just for photographs.
SaveThe Triangular Gable Detail
One of the project’s most direct architectural statements is the close-up geometry of the gable peak. The standing-seam metal roof converges at a sharp ridge, and the triangular glazed panel beneath it is set into a pale cladding surround with clean, beveled edges. The glass reflects the surrounding tree canopy, and the structural logic of the form is completely legible from the outside — the triangle is not decorative; it is load-bearing geometry made visible. This same A-shaped motif repeats at every floor and in every facade composition.
SaveThe Secondary Entrance Path and Stone Base
The lower secondary entrance arrives through the woods and delivers you to the stone-clad base of the house at garden level. The natural wood column here — warm-toned, square-sectioned — marks the threshold clearly without making a fuss about it. Sliding glazed doors open directly from the stone paving into the lower level. The landscape here is deliberately simple: flat stone step-stones set into bark mulch, young plantings, and a fire pit area visible to the left, with a figure-in-motion caught in the photograph suggesting how casually this entrance integrates into daily life.
SaveThe Covered Terrace Corridor
Looking through the covered terrace from one end to the other, the material language of the house becomes very tactile. Pale wood clads the columns, the ceiling, and the deck boards — all the same tone, all running in clean parallel lines. The stone wall of the house proper appears to the right, and at the end of the corridor a comfortable upholstered chair is positioned to face the treeline view through a glass panel. Pendant lights hang at measured intervals from the wood-clad ceiling. The whole passage functions as a transitional space between inside and out, sheltered but not enclosed.
SaveThe Wine Storage Volume, Seen from Outside
One of the more quietly compelling details visible from the exterior is a tall glazed panel at the junction of two roof volumes, which reveals a lit wine storage wall inside. Warm amber light pours out through the large window, shelves of bottles clearly visible behind glass, with a stair landing and a cushioned seat below. From outside in the early evening, this glowing interior window reads almost like a lantern — a reminder that the house is inhabited and that even its most functional spaces were considered from the outside looking in.
SaveWhat you might carry home
The Laurentian Forest House is a specific response to a specific site, but several of its moves are genuinely portable — not as direct copies, but as ways of thinking that scale down to a suburban lot or a house renovation.
The first is the idea of using one geometric shape consistently and letting it do the work of visual coherence. Here, the triangle and the A-form appear in the roofline, in the gable glazing, in the triangular zenithal window over the kitchen. If you picked one geometric motif for your own space — in a window shape, a hardware profile, a tile pattern — and repeated it with intention rather than accident, the rooms would feel composed rather than assembled.
The second is how the team handled the transition between inside and out. The covered terrace corridor is neither a deck nor an interior room; it is a calibrated in-between space, clad in materials warm enough to feel sheltered even without walls. If you have a covered porch or a breezeway that currently feels like leftover space, lining it in one continuous warm material — ceiling, column, floor in the same family — can change it from a passage into a destination.
The third is the double-sided fireplace as a room-divider that gives rather than takes. In an open-plan living area, the instinct is usually to keep the sightline clear. Here, the fireplace is placed at the boundary between the living area and the dining room, serving both without closing either off. If you are working with an open plan and want to create intimacy without putting up a wall, a peninsula element that has presence on two sides — a fireplace, a bookcase open on both faces, a kitchen island that doubles as a bar — can do the same thing.
The fourth is the use of material contrast to mark transitions. Stone at the base, pale panels and wood above, glass at the peaks — the house reads its own hierarchy from bottom to top. In a single room, you can borrow the same logic by keeping heavier, more grounded materials at floor level and lightening the palette as you move toward the ceiling. It is not a complicated idea, but it is one this project applies without compromise.
SaveThe Laurentian Forest House is ultimately about the discipline of following a logic through to its end — the slope of the land, the repeated triangle, the hierarchy of materials — and trusting that consistency is what makes a house feel inevitable rather than arbitrary. Photographers Annie Fafard and Sarah Dagenais captured it in full, and the complete project is credited to Luc Plante architecture + design.
