Vancouver-based Leckie Studio Architecture & Design has completed Lantern House, a contemplative residential project that successfully balances private sanctuary with neighborhood engagement. Located in a leafy, semi-urban area of Vancouver just a few subway stops south of downtown, the house addresses the significant design challenge of creating a secluded, meditative living environment while maintaining responsible urban citizenship.
Despite its lack of ground-floor windows, Lantern House takes seriously its street-facing responsibilities. The architect has thoughtfully assembled the two-story facade using rough stucco, board-formed concrete, and regionally sourced cedar, elevating these locally common materials to create a strong sense of contextual fit. The house deliberately disregards the formal and compositional conventions of its neighborhood context, but does so with careful consideration for its urban role.
The building's horizontal division creates a distinctive visual impact, with the upper glass-and-wood-clad section wrapped in a cedar-slat screen that dissolves the structure's height. This design strategy makes Lantern House appear shorter and more humble than its neighbors while maintaining distinctive gravitas through its symmetry and visually massive ground floor. The house sits on a 50-foot lot, wider than the neighborhood's typical 33-foot lots, allowing for more generous landscape treatment.
The foreground treatment significantly departs from neighborhood norms, featuring informal, textured plantings reminiscent of a forest glade. Three huge, roughly hewn granite blocks complement the architecture's monumentality while introducing an intermediate scale that connects the house to its ground. Combined with a mature oak tree at the front of the property, the effect creates a refreshing pocket park atmosphere along the traditionally lawn-lined street.
"This vernacular that we see around us is colonialist, so it's not something that we as a practice feel bound to replicate," says Michael Leckie, founding principal at Leckie Studio, recognized as a 2022 Design Vanguard. "Instead, we opt to respond to context through scale, proportion, and materiality." Leckie explains that Lantern House aims to communicate a sensibility that is "less precious, more natural, and, with its acceptance of materials weathering, more embracing of a kind of entropic beauty."
Inside, the house takes a similarly critical approach to domesticity, investigating from first principles the spatial configuration and characteristics that best support residents' daily life. The result is a calm and cloistered set of essential spaces, executed in authentic materials and neutral tones, washed in soft light. With the wood-framed structure's footprint measuring just 1,355 square feet, and the front and sides of its nine-square grid occupied by ancillary functions, the interior is more intimate than photography might convey.
The entry sequence consists of two rooms: first, a vestibule daylit only by the open door, and second, an anteroom where sidelight from a narrow window throws a simple bench and lime-washed wall into chiaroscuro. Dark and quiet, this pair of spaces forms an experiential threshold, moderating the sensory transition between the outside world and the sanctuary within. The term "mudroom" seems too prosaic for this carefully considered anteroom space.
After a second turn, visitors arrive at the center of the house, open in plan and subdivided in section. A polished concrete slab on grade steps down the site's gentle slope, with the first level defining a sunken living room and the next level creating a kitchen zone. Full-height glazing behind the kitchen opens to the garden beyond. At one end of the kitchen level, a millwork-encased dining alcove with built-in benches and a dropped ceiling forms a spatial eddy that remains apart from, yet still part of, the main space.
Above the living room, a 9-foot-square light well, a full story high, bathes the central space in the shifting brightness of the sky. The opening's wooden-grillwork sides diffuse this illumination and soften the ground floor's acoustics, which the level's predominantly hard and planar surfaces might otherwise have left too bright for comfort. From one corner of the living room, a clerestory-lit stair winds up to the second floor, where shadows from the grillwork and refracted light from a rim of mirror beneath the skylight create moments of visual interest on the lime-washed walls.
High windowsills provide all three bedrooms with privacy from nearby neighbors, while generous ceiling and door heights give the modestly sized rooms a sense of majesty and calm. Even though the principal bedroom faces the street, the view from the bed consists entirely of a seasonally changing canopy of oak leaves. Two bathrooms on this level continue the house's subtle plays of light and texture, with the architect's appreciation for Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's essay "In Praise of Shadows" and Peter Zumthor's Therme Vals particularly evident in the use of concealed apertures that send whispers of light across the bathing areas' tiled walls.
The attention to detail throughout the project represents a thorough design approach, with fine adjustments to wall thicknesses allowing tiles to remain whole, custom towel hooks aligned within grout lines, and door strikes designed in-house to work with frameless openings. "I often suggest to the team that the true merit of a work of architecture should be judged by its worst detail rather than its best," Leckie explains, a philosophy that has produced a place of coherence and serenity in Lantern House.
The project team included Michael Leckie as principal, James Eidse as lead design architect, Emily Dovbniak as project architect, and designers Irena Jenei, Holden Korbin, and Andrea Zittlau, with Ian Lee serving as interior designer. The 2,600-square-foot house was completed in September 2023 by general contractor Adisa Homes, creating what Leckie describes as "a sanctuary in the city" through its careful balance of privacy, contextual sensitivity, and architectural rigor.
