Two neighboring lots in North Vancouver, British Columbia, were integrated into a single ground airplane where a primary home, a pool house, and a greenhouse sit not as standalone buildings however as minutes within one constant landscape. Created by Garret Cord Werner Architects with interiors by HB Design, landscape by Donohoe Living Landscapes, and built by Meister Construction, the job deals with architecture, interiors, and surface as a single constant product argument– one where no aspect claims hierarchy over the others and every threshold in between inside and outside is intentionally blurred.
Approximately 6,100 square feet of developed space divides between a three-level primary house at 4,235 square feet and a 1,870-square-foot swimming pool house. No corridor or breezeway connects them– simply a street that the landscape plan turns into a genuine threshold, not an afterthought. Open the interior gates and a view corridor cuts clean through both properties. The greenhouse and vegetable planters deal with the public lane, and boulevard plantings spill past the residential or commercial property line. Ryan Donohoe, founder and principal landscape designer at Donohoe Living Landscapes, treated the border less like a fence and more like a civic gesture– pushing back versus the fortress thinking that drives so much rural domestic work.
The modern-day farmhouse vocabulary of the architecture– brick, wood slat, and generous glazing– finds its counterpoint in HB Design’s interior product method. Shannon Bradner, partner at the studio, led the interior work along with primary Jennifer Heffel, joining the task at a fairly sophisticated phase yet providing a drawing plan that the building and construction group at Meister found incredibly quick and coordinated. The scheme reads neutral and earthy, pulled from the tones currently present in the environments, however what in fact sets the interiors apart is how familiar products get revamped to sidestep their typical associations.
Porcelain tile, quartzite, and carefully selected woods were selected as much for how they catch and move light throughout the day as for their tonal fit with the architectural brick. Bradner’s approach layers differed textures versus one another– softening the precision of the architecture and pulling warmth into spaces that could quickly have gone cold. The sourcing alone took numerous months, a painstaking calibration of undertone and grain that talks to the sort of material connoisseurship more frequently related to high-end hospitality than single-family domestic work.
< img src="https://design-milk.com/images/2026/02/hb-design-north-vancouver-14-810x540.jpg" alt="Modern two-story home with dark metal siding and large windows, surrounded by trees and landscaped plant." width="810" height="540"/ >
< img src="https://design-milk.com/images/2026/02/hb-design-north-vancouver-35-810x540.jpg" alt="Modern two-story home with light-colored brick exterior, big windows, and dark accents, surrounded by trees and landscaped greenery." width="810" height="540"/ > < img src="https://design-milk.com/images/2026/02/hb-design-north-vancouver-33-810x540.jpg" alt="A cars and truck on the roadway." width="810" height="540"/ > View more info on HB Design’s site. Photography by Ema Peter. < img src="https://design-milk.com/images/2021/11/leo-lei-200x200-1-100x100.jpg" width="100" height="100" alt =""/ > Leo Lei translates his enthusiasm for minimalism into his daily-updated blog Leibal. In addition, you can discover distinctively created minimalist items and furniture at the Leibal Store.