VIDRO DO MAR
A touch of Brazil in Crescent Beach
BY PHILLIPA RISPIN
PHOTOGRAPHY: EMA PETER
What did you do on your vacation? Chances are that, unlike the owners of this home in the Crescent Beach neighbourhood, you didn’t decide to tear down a house and rebuild it, find a builder, find a designer, go approximately 10,000 kilometres away and leave them to it.
The lead-up to this unusual vacation started in 2007 when the homeowners and their children were preparing to move to Brazil for four years. They wanted to keep their Vancouver roots while they were away.
“I happened to be in Crescent Beach and saw an old cottage in foreclosure,” says one of the homeowners. “It had been squatted in and was derelict. I grew up in the area and have always liked Crescent Beach. Two days before the court hearing, I found the property. We made an offer in court and got the property. We rehabbed the inside and put it on the rental market. A year later we left for four years in Brazil.”
As the time approached for the family to move back to Vancouver, they decided to tear down the cottage and build a new family home. In 2011, while on vacation here, they looked at homes in the area, met with various builders and interviewed designers, choosing builder Ron Kliewer of KBC Developments and designer Carolyn Stewart of Concept To Design. The family returned to Brazil for their last year while the planning and design continued in Canada.
The process of designing the house was dictated by aesthetics, function and a characteristic of the land: “The site is in a flood plain and the minimum building elevation didn’t allow for a basement, which limited the overall square footage for this home,” says Stewart. “This meant I needed to plan the space so that I maximized the various areas within the home for efficient functioning.” Her designs for the two-storey interior pleasantly surprised the owners.
“It was a bit smaller than we had originally wanted, but Carolyn listened to us and designed a liveable, open, larger-feeling home,” the homeowner says. “Everywhere is usable space; there’s no dead space. It suits us fine.”
By the time the family came back to Canada driving 19,000 kilometres on the Pan American Highway, it was time to break ground and build.
The homeowner was on site nearly every day, as was Kliewer. The result after 10 months of work was two storeys of clean lines and calm colours, uncluttered space and sleek functionality spread over 2,800 square feet.
The owners call their home Vidro Do Mar, which is Portuguese for “sea glass.” They’ve brought blue-green sea tones to the decor and revel in the brightness and airiness of life by the shore.
“We use our interior lights hardly at all,” the homeowner says. “Natural light is a constant. It’s the perfect beach house.”
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