Inside a Modern Bowen Island Family Home Built on a Cliffside

Nestled into a cliff overlooking Horseshoe Bay, this 2,800-square-foot Bowen Island home looks deceptively simple: two boxes overlapping perpendicularly with clean, symmetrical lines. But that’s where the simplicity ends. “The simplest designs are often the most complicated,” laughs Genevieve Poirier of STARK Architecture & Interiors.

Faced with a steep, “unbuildable” site, Poirier and David Arnott of the Squamish-based firm had no choice but to get creative. “Just getting to the site was so complicated. The driveway was so steep,” adds Poirier. The site’s constraints not only shaped the home but cascaded into a series of thoughtful design moves, turning a boxy structure into a floating retreat amidst nature.

Their clients, Josh Gibson and Margarita Wyld of Surface Exteriors, were no strangers to construction and had always wanted to build a home for their family on Bowen Island. Surrounded by a rugged, forested landscape, the ocean-facing lot felt like the right place to bring that lofty vision to life. While the views were stunning, only a small section at the top of the hill rested on flat, solid bedrock. “It was a small lot that was mostly a cliff,” says Poirier. “There wasn’t much of a buildable area, and so [Gibson] used that opportunity to think outside the box.”

Sometimes that means negotiating the original 450-square-foot box you’re given. “We actually had to get a variance in order to build within the [zoning] setback,” says Poirier. With a relaxation granted by the municipality, the buildable area was expanded to 1,800 square feet.

And other times, it means stacking two literal boxes in midair, 150 feet above the road below. Undaunted by the terrain, Gibson approached the design team with a bold idea: not building on the site at all. “The only way to build something on this piece of land would be to cantilever it off,” explains Poirier.

That first idea guided the rest. The lower volume of the home was pinned into the bedrock and cantilevered 23 feet out, a feat that required some “structural gymnastics” from both the design team and structural engineer, Koosha Kheradmandnia of Arvand Consulting Engineering Corporation. Drawing from Kheradmandnia’s background in bridge design, the team implemented a similar system to support the span without relying on columns. “The entire building is basically a giant steel truss,” says Poirier. “We were able to use that same sort of structural technology to accomplish this house cantilever.”

Tucked into the lower volume are the private spaces, and the clients wanted every bedroom and bathroom to have views of the water. That meant orienting the lower volume’s longer edge to hug the cliff and maximize exposure. The upper volume, which houses the kitchen and living areas, is rotated 90 degrees and centred on top of the lower one. It matches the first box almost exactly in size and geometry, with a dramatic 30-foot cantilever toward the bay. This balanced placement and symmetry simplified the structural load and construction—a move that also created two generous decks on either side of the living space.

“We wanted the projection to be out as far as possible,” says Poirier. “Keeping it as symmetrical as possible and simple was very important, especially since everything had to align with the walls coming down from the top volume to the bottom just for structural and technical reasons.” Even with insulation and mechanical requirements layered in, the team worked to preserve the stacked form, keeping the two boxes crisp and distinct.

Glazing design became one of the most involved coordination efforts in the project. The architects worked closely with the structural engineer to place windows wherever possible without compromising the steel framework. “That was an intricate design dance that we did with the structural engineer to place windows in a way that made sense structurally but also what made sense for the design,” says Poirier. The result is a home that feels immersive, with full-height, frameless glass sliders in the living room, bedrooms and bathrooms, offering unobstructed views out to the ocean.

On the forest-facing sides, the architects punctuated the walls with smaller windows and doors to add quiet previews of nature, building anticipation before the full reveal. “We wanted to be able to have small little glances of what you’re looking at as this starts to cantilever out,” adds Poirier. “These are nice little moments that let you peek through to the woods.”

For the ocean-facing façade, they wanted the glazing to read as a single seamless surface, rather than a series of openings cut into a wall. To achieve that effect, the architects designed wall-to-wall glass with no external bracing and carefully considered connection details, preserving the clean, elegant form and blurring the boundaries between the indoors and out.

“It really circles back to how important it was to start with a simple idea and then follow it through,” says Poirier. “It’s really easy to add; it’s a lot harder to take away.” Her favourite moments are standing on the lower floor beneath the cantilevered section, where the projection feels most powerful, and lingering at the glass railing upstairs in the living room—suspended above the treetops and watching the sun rise over the distant mountains. “It’s really quite an intimate moment to be able to have such exposure to the outdoors but also feel really safe and private.”

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