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The architect Omar Gandhi’s Lookout at Broad Cove Marsh, constructed on a Cape Breton cliffside in 2016 using concrete and whitewashed local spruce.Credit...Andrew Rowat

On Architecture

In Nova Scotia, Homes as Wild as the Landscape Around Them

Across the province’s cliffside fishing towns, Omar Gandhi’s residential architecture is as austere and intense as the environment for which it’s built.

EVERY FEW DAYS, the Canadian architect Omar Gandhi migrates between Toronto, his hometown, and Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, where he opened his eponymous firm in 2010. A year and a half ago, Gandhi added New Haven to his weekly peregrinations — he was teaching a seminar at the Yale School of Architecture called Where the Wild Things Are, after Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book. For the final project of the semester, the professor took his class to the wind-swept island of Cape Breton (a glove-shaped appendage separated from Nova Scotia’s main peninsula by the narrow Strait of Canso) to visit Rabbit Snare Gorge — his 2013 project with the New York-based architecture firm Design Base 8 — a slender cabin that stretches 43 feet tall, like a 16th-century Mannerist portrait. Touring the surrounding plot, a 47-acre wooded slope bisected by the creek that gives the house its name, Gandhi, 40, asked his students to conceive a “campus of creatures” — a set of structures that, as he described it when we met at his Halifax studio last summer, “have an attitude and respond and look like they move.”

Where Sendak’s wild things were fierce, lumbering beasts, the house, dressed in long, pale panels of local white cedar, is spry and lithe, imbued with the same anarchic, leaping energy as Max, the book’s boy king. Built for a New Jersey lawyer who has vacationed in Nova Scotia for years, it looks toward a 120-foot bluff fronting the Gulf of St. Lawrence, three miles outside the village of Inverness. A broad 20-by-8-foot bank of windows faces west over a narrow chute of black spruce and birch toward a slim triangle of water, etched on blustery days with white caps, like a sinister sea in an Edward Gorey illustration. The structure gracefully withstands Nova Scotia’s often brutal weather, its 1,200 square feet split over three spartan floors; each level has a 14-inch ring beam to help protect against the island’s gale-force winds. “We’ve always thought of our buildings as these sort of creatures,” Gandhi says, and this one’s job “is to get up as high as possible to see these long views.” Architects often discuss the tasks their buildings accomplish, but Gandhi talks about his as if they have their own inchoate desires: His houses don’t just serve a purpose, they have lives of their own. In fact, the house at Rabbit Snare Gorge is part of a family, Gandhi’s own campus of creatures, originally planned for the site. The second structure, a boat shed made from the same faded planks of local white cedar, is shaped like a crystal of Maldon salt, stretched low over the ground, its form distended by forward motion, as though ensnared in its sprint through the forest. (The third, a lookout tower at the water’s edge, was never born.)

With this project, Gandhi encapsulated his vision for a new Nova Scotian architecture. Across the province — from the highlands of Cape Breton, which draw hordes of tourists each fall to witness the dense forest’s flamboyant transition into winter, to the marshlands of the south across the Bay of Fundy from Maine — shingled houses painted in shades of aubergine, sage and slate line up along country roads that overlook skiffs and lobster boats bobbing on the mercurial, cobalt sea. Front yards are decorated not with flower beds or lawn ornaments but with tangled mounds of fishing rope and buoys the color of wild strawberries. The names of the villages that line the peninsula’s rocky perimeter — Antigonish and Isle Madame, Argyle and Lunenburg — speak to the region’s long polyglot history, beginning with the Mi’kmaq indigenous peoples, whose land was taken starting in the 17th century by Scottish, English, French and German colonizers. Even today, many here still speak Gaelic or Acadian, the French dialect introduced by the first European settlers in 1604. Fishing remains an important industry. Nova Scotia, Gandhi says, “is a place that doesn’t change very quickly.” But Rabbit Snare Gorge injects the island’s static saltbox vernacular with sudden kinetic energy, an argument for the 20th-century theory that evolution happens not gradually, as Charles Darwin suggested, but in dramatic bursts. Rather than modernizing the traditional cottages that punctuate the province’s tundra-like landscape with new technologies or imported materials, Gandhi has brought them to jarring life, not so much creating finished structures as releasing them into the wild.

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Design Base 8 and Omar Gandhi’s Rabbit Snare Gorge, an elongated cabin of local white-cedar planks built in 2013 in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.Credit...Andrew Rowat

BORN IN TORONTO, Gandhi first arrived in Halifax in 2001 as a student at Dalhousie University. Seven years later, he was hired as an associate at MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, for decades the most prominent firm in eastern Canada’s Maritime Provinces. Eighteen months later, he opened his own practice in a Halifax attic, quickly developing an aesthetic that was darker and more dynamic than his former employer’s spare, elegant precision. When Gandhi photographs his work, he usually does so in winter, and even when designing vacation homes, he imagines them in the blustery, gray months of December and January. His houses are both cocoons and binoculars, swaddling you in warm wood while projecting your vision outward. “Minimalism makes a big difference for an anxious person,” he says.

One of his first residential projects, in 2012, was for a doctor who’d recently returned home to practice medicine after years working as a clinician in Vancouver and commissioned a house on a family plot in a working-class fishing town near southern Cape Breton. The client, Jonah Samson, spent his days in intense, private conversations with his patients, and shared a narrow, gravel road with much of his extended family. “I told Omar I wanted a house that says, ‘Screw off,’” Samson says; in response, Gandhi built a pair of simple seaside cabins under steep aluminum gables, then removed all windows from the side facing the road and stained both buildings black. Less formally extreme than Rabbit Snare Gorge, Black Gables, as the house is known, shares an inherently frigid ethos: Even in the long, dazzling days of Nova Scotia’s briefly glorious spring, both houses evoke shadows and ice.

Gandhi builds such intensity into even his sunniest projects. For his clients Sandra and John Furber, a pair of real-estate developers from Toronto, the architect built a low-slung ranch-style home on a dramatic cliffside plot in 2016. The Furbers found the five undeveloped acres through a newspaper listing that advertised them as “not for the faint of heart,” and the first time they visited the land — strung along a narrow slope overgrown with a thicket of wild roses — they thought building there would be impossible. Rather than fight the site’s steep incline, Gandhi built a 3,000-square-foot house that echoes its contours: long and narrow, with a slanted roof that mimics the hillside.

Called the Lookout at Broad Cove Marsh — after the nearby curve where locals like to park their cars and stare out over the water — the house huddles on its cliff, all but invisible from the road. Inside, the layout is simple but cozy: A long hallway connects the combined living room and kitchen, enclosed by a swath of sea-facing glass, with bedrooms and bathrooms contained in whitewashed wooden pods, their views to the outside framed by narrow nine- foot-tall windows. If Rabbit Snare appears to launch itself skyward, the Lookout seems to be hunkering down for the long winter, with its roof, Gandhi says, “like a hat pulled down low over the eyes — a little bit menacing.”

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Another view of the Lookout at Broad Cove Marsh. The low-slung ranch-style home has a slanted roof that mimics the hillside.Credit...Andrew Rowat

FAR FROM THE dramatic cliffs and forests surrounding Rabbit Snare Gorge and Broad Cove Marsh in the north, the southern end of Nova Scotia trails off into the sea like a tattered flag. Nondescript main streets in modest nautical towns unfurl past pale clapboard houses. Water flashes, blue as lapis, from behind bottle-green stands of pine. If Nova Scotia is slow to change, as Gandhi says, then this corner of the province feels unchanged from a century ago.

It’s a fitting location for Gandhi’s most dynamic house to date: Sluice Point. More than any of his other creatures, the 3,800-square-foot property looks to the future even as it makes use of building techniques drawn from Nova Scotia’s past. The faceted exterior, shingled in white cedar and faded by wind and rain to the color of polished pewter, is built in a concave bend around a circular gravel driveway. Floating centimeters off the ground on its recessed concrete foundation, the facade resembles the drying gray haystacks lifted on stilts in the nearby fields. A tall windbreak, white as a glacial crevasse, circumscribes the front door, shrouding it from view. Rather than embracing the shallow tidal inlet on its opposite side, the glider-shaped structure seems to soar toward it, its wings pointing inland as it rushes toward the water.

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An aerial view of 2017’s Sluice Point, on the southern tip of Nova Scotia, its roof and facade clad in white-cedar shingles.Credit...Andrew Rowat

Gandhi conceived of the residence, a holiday home for a Swiss lawyer, as a classic hip roof separated from the boxy undergirding of a typical Nova Scotian house. He built it in 2017 using the same wooden trusses that support similar roofs all over the province: a basic structure amphibiously evolving, its appendages pushing up against a sturdy membrane of knotty, gray wood. “The land here is not just beautiful but untouched, so we wanted to produce something that felt, if you squinted your eyes, like it was always there,” Gandhi says. “Not like a heritage house, but like an organism.”

Though Gandhi’s projects are dramatically different in form, such consideration of their remote, subarctic backdrop connects them to one another — they “look like they could only be in Nova Scotia,” he says. It’s a slow, tough place, surrounded either by water that seems like it might be happier as ice or, on the southern coast, by trees so sparse and stunted that they probably would have preferred to grow elsewhere. Whether reaching up or crouching down or rushing forward, the homes look frozen at a critical moment in their evolution, giving the unsettling impression that they might well lurch into motion the moment you turn your back. It’s the architectural analogue of an unshakable childhood fantasy: That nothing is truly inanimate, that anything — even, as in Sendak’s book, the walls of an ordinary house — might, at any moment, come miraculously to life.

A correction was made on 
Feb. 3, 2020

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of one of Omar Gandhi's clients; he is Jonah Samson, not Sampson. The article also referred incorrectly to Charles Darwin’s 1859 theory of evolution. Darwin hypothesized that evolution happened gradually, not in dramatic bursts. And the article and an accompanying picture caption referred incompletely to the designers of Rabbit Snare Gorge; they were Design Base 8 and Omar Gandhi, not solely Omar Gandhi.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section ST, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: By Design: Nova Scotia Grace. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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