Architect's Mind-Blowing Cabin Floats 60 Feet Above the Ground – OFF GRID CABIN TOUR

I love being in the canopy of the trees we're about 60 ft above the ground you have this beautiful Panorama and then the lake Beyond it's pretty special for me the most beautiful time to be here is uh in the winter just sitting here with the fire and then watching the snowfall that's when this space is most magical we're located in the province of Quebec and it's a quite a remote area it's about 5 km off of the last road so we're surrounded really just by forests and lakes this is the last inhabited Lake for quite a while and I was very much looking for Steep piece of land uh I like the idea of being up in the air lived most of my life in a par ments and I like uh being far above the ground the cabin is between 900 and 1,000 s ft it's U about 100 ft long and it's tapering so we're kind of lightening the load as we are suspended in the air so that's one reason to have the form but the other one is that to keep it long and skinny it's just a very efficient way to lay out a couple of rooms you know we're living off the grid here so the only energy we have is from solar and so um you know have to make do with uh maximizing daylight especially um you know solar gain say for the winter months when we're here and um and cross ventilation in the um in the summer so it's just kind of the obvious proportion to be using being off the grid we had to you know figure out the most efficient ways um to heat during the winter and to be able to have all of our utilities and everything working um but even simple things like buying a high efficiency refrigerator buying a washer dryer that's high efficiency that they all take very little power and being off the grid doesn't mean you have to compromise you just have to temper your behavior a little bit we have uh 3,800 Watts for solar collectors and a 3 kilowatt lithium battery um and that provides us with sufficient service for the building I been waiting a very long time to build this it's moved in fits and starts simply because of uh all kinds of technical Logistics and uh Municipal Logistics with this piece of land were're required to be back uh about a 100 ft from the shoreline for environmental reasons which I think is great uh but um the issue is with this very steep piece of land if I actually built 100 ft back I would have done far more damage to the uh Hillside and to the local trees so I spoke to the municipality and said hey look if you let me have a tiny tiny Foundation at 75 ft back from the water and the house is going to be elevated quite High about uh 6 stories uh can I can't leave the nose of the cabin so there's a fraction of the uh disruption to the to the ground below to the trees the water line and the wildlife communities that are here we have very sophisticated digital software but nothing works better than a physical model and so what you're looking at here is is the last physical model it would have been I don't know 15 probably before this again because we said hey look we're just going to put a tiny little Foundation here and then the rest is going to extend but because it's so high up it's not going to interfere with the water line below they were in agreement with it and it was It was kind of pretty sweet like first you know they're looking at it and then you know there's a bunch of counselors there and the mayor of the municipality and they're all kind of grinning thinking this is this is kind of nuts and they I think they just thought that it was never going to happen so they approved it I had a wonderful relationship with all the folks at the municipality cuz they've been super supportive but it is true that the whole thing began as a kind of a I don't know implausible implausible uh Venture we decided we would really like to try to experiment with cross laminated Timber we thought that we should try to push the limits of the material and so it's basically it's like an enormous piece of plywood and so being a thin material the pieces I'm using are only about this Dimension so it would be impossible for the material to span 50 ft between the front foundation and back on its own and it's very much like I use the analogy if you have a piece of paper it has no structural rigidity but all you have to do is if you fold it suddenly it's very rigid and so something with minuscule Dimension becomes structurally sound and so the underside of the the cabin has this vshape and then the roof is exactly the mirror of that and so it allows the greatest structural span with the smallest amount of materials and so for starters there is the um you can see here the uh the folded roof plane which gives rigidity whether it's in this form or this form so you're entering at the low point right and it's going up here but this wall is going down so it's more geometrically uh complicated than a a standard Ridge beamed Palm so this is the foundation in the back which is also um a very small volume which is holding the solar batteries this is in concrete and this is the steel Mass which is again about 20 M 60 ft tall which is sitting on a very small concrete foundation in a conventional home this would have been 250 linear ft of a perimeter of a concrete foundation but by not having any of that by just having this small piece here and here the use of concrete is a fraction compared to what it would have been so being elevated like this is a means to produce the use of the material a question that comes up frequently is well isn't your floor going to be cold because there's no basement so to manage the temperature the two most important things are airtightness and a well insulated roof right so the cross- laminated Timber is so precisely Mill and window technology has become so Advanced that the air tightness factor is extremely high and we do have insulation above the CLT of the roof so keeping the heat inside in the winter is not an issue and there's a a large pocket of air underneath the floor slab which works to help with insulating it yeah I'll I'll walk you through the cabin So It Begins obviously out doors we have a ramp which is about uh 10 m 30 ft and we uh so deliberately made it a ramp so it's accessible to everyone which is also why it's all on one level as opposed to being multiple levels and the ramp is kind of an open grill for a couple of reasons one it's nonskid it also means that rain snow ice falls through so it's accessible all through the year uh and then that we have a a small uh kind of porch area which is where we would leave our snowshoes skis in the winter because again it's 5 km that's not being plowed in the winter and we're here every weekend and that's kind of the way we get in uh we put little packs on the dog and put packs on ourselves everybody um has to uh you know do their share and uh so then you enter the first space really is the a very large closet and the second space is a multi-purpose room so uh I guess most importantly for human use it has two bunks so uh the cabin can easily fit six people very comfortably probably fit eight in a pinch um so in this first little room is also the space for the mechanical cuts of the building we have the water heater we have the inverter for the solar uh panels and then there's a washer dryer the you might have in a boat that kind of does everything all in one unit and you know just storage for kind of immediate necessities and the uh the next space is a guest room which is also my office I mean it's you know it's a a pretty rare weekend when I don't have to do a little bit of work here it's also the one room where there's uh internet booster which is our only hope to uh to connect with the outside world so it's also um the I guess the mother ship for communication with the with the city and the next room is the bathroom where we have uh this is an antique door knocker and uh it's actually a far more generous uh bathing area than we have in the city so it's a kind of like a little mini Spa here which is the reward for uh you know when you track in in the winter and then the next space is a sleeping it was it's kind of the master bedroom I guess it was envisioned that initially to be completely closed in with walls floor to ceiling and then we decided that was uh not desirable because we already have the view there's plenty of ventilation and so in a way it's not but it it is the primary U bedroom area so in this area is the uh primary storage for clothing sheets towels Linens so this is the primary storage area for the entire cabin and so now we're moving into the kitchen living room dining area uh and games room I guess and you can see that at this point it becomes obvious that we're uh really starting to be elevated so you know we're at the level of the trees and there's birds an animal life down below us and um and it's also at the point where the uh the hillside starts dropping off so you can see that um we're even above some of the trees and I should say too that the trees around us are deciduous so what happens in the summer is that the trees are blocking a lot of the solar gain cuz we're facing south and we do have blinds that have a reflective backing to keep the Sun out in the winter the leaves are obviously gone and we rely considerably on the solar gain the primary heating system for the cabin is a high efficiency wood stove the kitchen is pretty small but completely suits our purposes we're off grid so the electricity from the solar panels provides the uh the power for the refrigerator and freezer and also really important is the dishwasher uh we have we have a well which also means that even in the winter we have uh fresh water coming in and then we have the storage wall which has all kinds of things that we're using um routinely and for an emergency if it was incredibly bitter cold we do have a backup uh propane heater in the bathroom and here and then also next to the heater is uh Jeth row trough I call it Jethro who's 160 lb leon burger and um his manners are uh in development let's say and uh next to that we have uh I don't know the beginning of the collection of antique furniture that comes primarily from Antonio's family this is our small dining area and uh it's a double- Decker table basically so there's the eating surface but then it lifts off and there's a place where the puzzles live underneath uh so again that's just an idea of saving space so we don't have to keep moving aboard with the puzzles while um while they're being made and then we have the lounging part of the house our sofa which is um indestructible uh and covered with a waterproof fabric so that chro again the dog is going to be able to go on there whether he is being permitted or not and the living room wall has some really beautiful First Nations art from British columia and then we have the high efficiency wood stove which uh it it's plenty enough to keep the cabin warm um even in on the coldest days and then uh this wood storage box is custom made which also has a place for kindling and then also just paper to get things going in the summer we spend as much time here as we can in the winter we come up every weekend and being remote distance-wise you have to put some physical effort into it in the summer time we Battle Bugs there are horse flies and deer flies and mosquitoes and black flies and that's a bit of a frustration and there are times when you you walk in and if it's minus 30 outside it's a little brisk to get things fired up to get things warmed up but you know 4 hours the place is usually toasty warm just using the um wood fireplace growing up at a cottage with my grandparents my favorite thing is still the same thing a bunch of people for dinner and after dinner's over everybody plays games for the night it's just a real treat to have a group of people around a table and have a lot of fun it's kind of like the simple part of [Music] life subscribe to exploring Alternatives and please share this video if you liked it you can also find out more about the more CLT cabin and other projects on The kuk Architects website and Instagram thanks for watching

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 1,350,190

Keywords: cabin, tour, hover, float, cantilever, cantilevered, CLT, cross laminated timber, wood, steel, mast, post, foundation, no foundation, floating, hovering, in the sky, tall, 60 feet, 6 storys, high, in the air, dramatic, beautiful, m.o.r.e., Kariouk, Architects, Paul Kariouk, Exploring Alternatives, interior, off, grid, solar, power, south, facing, lake, cottage, dream, epic, stove, heat, propane, internet, design, architecture, architect, black, windows, engineering, engineered, passive, well, batteries, dog, 2023, 2024, new, best, home

Id: pMxM-zkGl90

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2023