The views were already there. They just weren't being used. For a young family in Upper Lonsdale, a whole-house renovation was the opportunity to finally unlock what the home had always been sitting on — and nowhere was that more true than the upper floor.

The existing post and beam structure made the most important move straightforward: with the load already carried by the bones of the building, the walls came out. The entire upper floor opened up into the kind of expansive West Coast modern living space that the structure had always been capable of supporting. Multiple large sliding doors were added along the city-facing elevation, opening onto a floor-level deck that dissolves the boundary between inside and the view beyond. A partial glass railing maintains privacy from below without interrupting the sightlines — the city, the water, the horizon, all of it unobstructed.

The kitchen was rebuilt from the ground up, designed specifically for social cooking and serious entertaining. With a pastry chef from France at the helm, the brief went beyond the standard renovation checklist — this needed to be a kitchen that a professional would actually want to cook in, with the layout, the space, and the details to match. It is.

A home that always had the ingredients. It just needed the right design to bring them together.