Azure: Cabin Rules

Azure, May/June 2022

For this issue’s hospitality section, I wrote about new cabins at a Quebec resort. Here’s a small snippet:

Not all outdoorsy travellers relish the rugged accommodations of a tent or log cabin. Recognizing this, Sépac (the government arm that oversees Quebec’s parks) and Lac Saint-Joseph resort Station Touristique Duchesnay decided to replace all of the latter’s detached half-century-old cabins — 14 rustic cottages painted bright yellow, clashing with one another and their surroundings — with sleek chalets that offer all the accoutrements of a modern home. A collaboration between Bourgeois / Lechasseur Architectes and Coarchitecture, the 14 new Ogygène cabins bring the site up to date while blending it in with nature.

“We endeavoured to integrate the new constructions into the landscape for a more coherent look,” says Olivier Bourgeois, founding partner of Bourgeois / Lechasseur Architectes. To preserve the site’s topography and avoid tree removal, the architects positions the cabins on the same plots as their predecessors and took advance of the existing slopes by creating smaller garden-level floors for some models. Echoing the main hotel’s dark greyish-brown cladding, the chalets are wrapped in lodgepole pine with a brown-tinted charcoal finish, save for their entryways, which are defined by contrasting eastern white cedar. All units have pitched black steel roofs for both aesthetic and practical reasons: The angles have a modern-architecture bent and aid in snow removal, the shape of the gables helps the structures recede into the landscape, and their slim, exaggerated lengths minimize obstructions to the lake views from the nearby hiking paths.