Located on an off-grid Salish Sea island, Ranch Outpost includes generous outdoor living spaces that blur the line between interior and exterior. The interiors for the project were designed in collaboration with Sophie Burke Design. Photo by Andrew Latreille
Laura Killam?s Vancouver-based design studio emerged in a deeply personal and serendipitous way when she returned home to the British Columbia coast, after stints in Los Angeles and Montreal, to raise her family.
When she started building seasonal homes along the Salish Sea, the first six were for members of the community she grew up within, on an island in Desolation Sound. This allowed her to establish an approach to designing and building for wild, remote sites. Her clients trusted her to create living spaces that would enrich?and be enriched by?their settings. As she puts it, ?the building plays second to the natural environment.? Killam begins by carefully reading a site. She returns often?as often as deadlines and budget will allow, but certainly every couple of months?to spend time studying the terrain, the views, the sun, and the wind. For one thing, the right building site has to be found before design begins. Killam is rarely working in a context where property boundaries, zoning, or setbacks are at play, so natural criteria determine siting, while other constraints are discovered through the process.
Located on an off-grid Salish Sea island, Ranch Outpost includes generous outdoor living spaces that blur the ...