A Whistler Cabin Designed for Real Mountain Life

Most people wouldn’t start designing a mountain home by asking how many people can use a bathroom all at once. For designer Denise Ashmore, though, the request wasn’t entirely surprising. Her team at Project 22 Design has worked with homeowners Gord and Leann Ahrens since 2010, across four projects and more than one interesting bathroom layout.

In the latest home, a newly built modern Whistler cabin, the layout—with a separate water closet behind a lockable door, a private shower and sink area—allows more than one person to use the bathroom at the same time without sacrificing privacy. It’s the kind of detail that reflects Gord’s years of living in Whistler and developing homes there, as well as his experience working on ski resorts in Japan. “He’s done that consistently in most of his builds,” says Ashmore, “because he knows how it is to live and work in Whistler.

Known as Ambassador, the 3,600-square-foot home sits in Whistler’s White Gold neighbourhood, close to the village and ski lifts, on a quiet corner lot that backs onto Fitzsimmons Creek. Designed for a family of five that regularly welcomes visiting friends and family, the home is built for the realities of mountain life while providing a cozy, inviting retreat. Its warmth comes as much from the natural materials palette as from the way people move through and use the house, balancing spaces for gear, guests and daily routines. “It’s intentionally designed, but there’s a casualness to the planning and the thought put behind it,” says Ashmore.

Behind that easygoing feeling was some careful manoeuvring on the home’s odd-shaped lot. Working with C.S. Clark Design and contractor Sean Cooper of Creekworks Construction, Ashmore’s team fine-tuned the home’s layout to make the most of the property’s limited views and natural light. Using a reverse floor plan, the design team placed the kitchen, dining and living areas on the upper floor and reserved those “peekaboo” glimpses of the mountains for the spaces used most during the day. The primary bedroom is also located upstairs, tucked at one end of the floor for privacy.

Downstairs, two guest bedrooms, a bunk room, the aforementioned bathroom and a separate TV room offer plenty of space for teenagers and guests to spread out, while a dedicated ski room doubling as a laundry space neatly handles the less pristine parts of coming home from the slopes with wet gear.

Throughout the home, an earthy palette of soft whites, wood tones, muted greys and natural stone creates a relaxed atmosphere, echoing the forested surroundings. On the upper level, saddle-leather dining chairs and a dark leathered quartzite island sit against rough-sawn hemlock walls and smooth-finished hemlock ceilings. And against all that wood, large-format porcelain tile flooring resembling poured concrete provides a quiet, more industrial base on both levels—one durable enough to stand up to wet boots, salt and mountain life.

“None of it is precious,” says Ashmore. “The walls are durable; the floor is durable. No one has to worry about damaging this. It’s just going to get better with time.”

But nowhere do warmth and function come together more clearly than at the entry, where, Ashmore says, “hemlock is the star of the show.” Guests enter the home to a hemlock-slatted wall and oak bench, while a line of 20 wall hooks offers a practical, unfussy alternative to closed closet doors.

“You instantly feel like, ‘I can put my stuff where I want. I’m here; I’m welcome,’” she explains. The slatted wall then wraps around the corner into the staircase, leading guests through an intimate “compression” zone before they arrive on the upper floor, while wood-wrapped ceiling joists frame skylights filtering light from above. “It really gives you a moment to collect yourself, and then you’re up in the mix of it all,” says Ashmore.

Overhead, that rhythm of compression and expansion continues in the sloped ceiling, which rises and falls across the upper level. Higher ceilings create a sense of openness in the kitchen and dining areas and draw the eye toward the view outside, while lower ceilings help make spaces like the living room, primary suite and office feel more intimate.

The shifting heights offer a gentle nudge toward the home’s gathering spaces, where a 10-foot-wide window above the counter brings in additional light and retractable glass doors open the kitchen to the deck for indoor-outdoor hosting. The rounded forms of the Lock and Mortice walnut dining table, Bensen dining chairs and walnut coffee table also help keep circulation between rooms loose and informal.

For Ashmore, that freedom and casual atmosphere are part of what makes a cabin: a public-private space grounded in its setting, shared with family and friends throughout the seasons. It might look as simple as a welcoming bench for your things on your way through the front door, a clear path toward the living spaces and hosts calling down, “Come on up, we’re just upstairs.”