This house on the Magdalen Islands trades a fixed address for a study of erosion and endurance. Montreal-based design-build studio atelier l’abri lets erosion set nearly every decision behind Magdalen House, a compact home perched on a Magdalen Islands plateau. The house rests above the dunes of Havre-Aubert Island, reading Magdalen vernacular building traditions as a living language rather than a fixed style. Every choice, from siting to shingle, works to keep faith with a coastline that keeps moving.
Set back from the shoreline, the house occupies an existing inhabited plateau rather than pushing toward the water, a decision that let the architects preserve the site’s protected dune ecosystem in its entirety. The plateau itself sits within a graded sequence of increasingly sensitive environments — the Atlantic Ocean, a wide sandy beach, the dunes, a natural bluff — before building is even permitted. It’s a siting logic other Quebec houses on exposed water have had to work through too, among them Maison du Lac Perdu by Ravi Handa Architect, where the shoreline similarly dictated where the architecture could land.
The dune ecosystem the house avoids disturbing depends on a fragile balance between vegetation, wind-driven sand transport, and the seasonal rhythm of the coastline — a balance easily broken by development. Soil bearing capacity, coastal erosion, and the maritime climate drove both the siting and the structural design, and part of the house and its large terrace are consequently raised on timber piles along the most stable edge of the plateau. The strategy limits excavation, reduces the volume of concrete required, and keeps the direct sightline to the dunes, the beach, and the ocean intact.
Birds and foxes share the plateau with the house, and the project’s relationship to that presence is one of restraint rather than intrusion — the architecture positions itself alongside the site’s ecosystems without disturbing them.
The Magdalen house typology the project draws from emerged on the archipelago between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a local adaptation of the Acadian house shaped by wind, salt air, and the logistics of island life: a simple gable form, a one-and-a-half-storey layout, a compact plan, and a cedar shingle roof built for an exposed maritime climate. atelier l’abri reads this typology not as a style to reproduce but as a body of construction knowledge to extend — an approach that echoes the way La Maraude, Nathalie Thibodeau Architecte’s Quebec cabin, treats vernacular form as a working method rather than a period reference.
Cedar shingles clad both the roof and the exterior walls, left to weather naturally to a silvery grey over time. The exposed structure beneath the terrace and the piles is eastern hemlock, chosen for its resistance to the maritime climate, while the guardrails are marine-grade stainless steel mesh selected specifically for its resistance to salt air.
Inside, the material palette shifts to pine flooring and wall paneling paired with North American natural stone, continuing the dialogue with the landscape beyond the glazing. The light fixtures come from a Quebec manufacturer, the custom millwork was built by a woodworker based on Cap-aux-Meules Island, and the art and ceramics chosen by the clients were all made by artists and artisans from the Magdalen Islands.
A central service core — kitchen, utility spaces, bathroom, and the staircase to the mezzanine — anchors an otherwise compact and legible plan. Living areas face west toward the setting sun and the landscape, bedrooms catch the morning light, and a double-height living space adds a sense of volume without adding to the building’s footprint, with large openings extending the experience of the site inward.
Built with contractors and craftspeople from the Magdalen Islands, Magdalen House closes its own loop — the same island community whose building knowledge shaped the vernacular the house draws on also raised it, and made the ceramics and artwork inside it. In a few decades the cedar shingles will have gone fully silver, the one change the architects designed the house to accept from the start.
Magdalen House by atelier l’abri | Location: Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Quebec, Canada — Year: 2024 — Key materials: cedar shingles, eastern hemlock, marine-grade stainless steel mesh, pine flooring and paneling, North American natural stone