© Francis Pelletier
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La Cornette is a country house built on the slope of a small hill, which opens to the pastoral landscape that surrounds it. Under a towering roof resembling a nun’s cornet wimple is a spacious dwelling modelled on traditional old Quebec houses that lodged large households and their relatives. The house that was designed for two families for celebrations and holidays , is set into the naturally uneven terrain in a way that brings each level into direct contact with the enveloping natural environment. it provides a resting place for all guests under its large gable in a sequence of bedrooms and unusual sleeping spaces.
A massive structure, like the agricultural buildings that surround it, the house is both traditional in its morphology and ingenious in its use of materials. This is a house beyond the domestic scale, Shingled with raw fibre-cement panels on the walls and roof, simple and wither proof, capable of standing the test of time, The house is striated with bands of horizontal windows, giant louvers that cut the sun at its most powerful, with new points of view at each level. It is covered by its wimple from the hot summer sun and flooded with light in the winter, requiring neither air-conditioning nor heating on sunny days.
The interior is in wood, painted or natural, in planks or panels, designed almost entirely of made-to-measure furniture pieces: from the refectory table for meals to the day table with hideaway television set; from the large wraparound couch in the living room to the stainless-steel kitchen island; from the balustrade bookshelf along the stairway to the wall night-lights made of aluminum panels with cut-outs of fireflies, fish, and frogs; from wall-to-wall beds where people sleep foot-to-foot to overhanging bunk beds floating in the landscape.
It is a playground for architects, children, and adults, a holiday colony lost in the countryside.
