Halifax-based studio MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects built Hilltop Cottage in New Brunswick to look like a single, monolithic block — until its doors slide open and an entire corner disappears without a single piece of steel holding anything up. The 600-square-foot pavilion overlooks a river valley below, marking the site where its owners got engaged. What reads as solid from a distance turns out, at close range, to be an instrument built specifically for viewing the landscape.
Sliding barn doors conceal every opening on the exterior, keeping the cottage’s presented form primary and unbroken from the outside. That monolithic first impression is deliberate: nothing about the shingle-clad New Brunswick pavilion hints at what happens once those doors move.
A hipped roof and thickened walls carry the weight of that impression, drawing on the vernacular language of historic Scottish shielings and Irish tower houses — small, thick-walled structures built to hold their ground against open landscape. A foundation of local field stone grounds the cottage in that same material logic.
Glazed wood doors add a second layer of enclosure behind the barn doors, and it’s here that the trick happens: when both layers retract, the cottage’s north corner vanishes completely, with no steel structure doing the work behind the scenes. Natural light and air move directly through the wall openings, folding the surrounding landscape into the interior rather than simply framing it from behind glass.
That opening move supports a house within a house structure at the cottage’s core. Two vaulted skylights pull the interior volume upward, creating a nested central living space — a parti the studio traces directly to Charles Moore’s 1962 Orinda House, reworked here at a fraction of the scale.
The cottage belongs to a type rather than standing alone: MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple treats it as an offspring of its own precedent projects. Retracted, the doors reveal a deep overhang that recalls the exaggerated roof proportions of the studio’s own Bigwin Cabin, carried over rather than reinvented from scratch.
The walls themselves hide cavities four feet thick, holding the hearth, kitchen, and storage — the same strategy the studio used at its Morris House and El Aleph Guest House, where daily life gets pushed into the thickness of the outer walls instead of occupying open floor space.
A woven cedar skin wraps the whole structure in eastern white cedar shingles, mitred at the corners into a single taut surface. It’s a material discipline that recalls how Baillie Baillie’s Iorram cottage in the Scottish Highlands uses thick clay-block walls and local Douglas fir to root a new-build cottage in centuries of vernacular precedent rather than inventing a new material language from scratch.
The studio has cited a line from Octavio Paz to frame the project: “Taken alone, tradition stagnates, and modernity vaporizes.” It’s a fitting note for a building whose field stone foundation sits directly beneath a roofline borrowed from Scottish shielings — old ground, holding up a house that spends most of its life with its corner open to the valley below.
Hilltop Cottage by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects | Location: New Brunswick, Canada — Year: 2023 — Key materials: eastern white cedar shingles, local field stone foundation, glazed wood doors