Whether shacks or mansions, condos or cabins, homes in the territories are as varied – and as vivid – as the Northerners who inhabit them. To see where we live and why we love it, take off your boots and step inside for a tour.
The faux Victorian
For two Whitehorse homeowners, what’s new is old again
Most people think Forest and Georgi Pearson live in the most immaculately preserved historic home in Whitehorse. Truth is, the industrious couple knocked down an old shack so they could put together, piece by piece, a brand new house that appears like it leapt out of the gold rush. “I think we got it pretty much right,” Forest says confidently. “If you go look around Dawson, you’ll find houses from the early 1900s that look just like this. But ours is green-certified and R2000.”
Every detail of the couple’s Jarvis Street house, from the floor dimensions and banisters right down to the lighting fixtures and knobs, is as historically accurate as possible. The young couple – both engineers – spent four years reading books, snapping photos, drawing plans and collecting pallet after pallet of shrink-wrapped antiques that they got shipped up from Georgi’s ancestral Ontario.
The home is thus full of stories: The old pedestal sink came from Georgi’s aunt’s farmhouse; a vent cover was originally in her grandmother’s place. Wrought iron beds are family heirlooms. Light-switch covers were salvaged from the Discovery Mine ruins north of Yellowknife. It’s hard to find a single feature that doesn’t predate 1950. “I like to think you build your house out of style,” says Forest, “so you never have to worry about it going out of style.”
Indeed, you can’t help feeling nostalgic, sitting on the Pearsons’ sunny back porch. It’s an exact replica of the one on Whitehorse’s historic Captain Martin House Museum a few blocks away. The dark-green colour of the siding is a perfect match to the trim-stain on St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Dawson City. There are sloping shingled roofs, ornate dormer-covers, and a heavy, welcoming front door. Georgi chases the couple’s young son, Finn, around the lawn and says, “I don’t think we’ll ever move out. How could we? We’re too attached.”
The tundra tube
In a hamlet in the High Arctic, an architect builds his very own pipe-dream
Richard Carbonnier’s home is impossible to miss. It looks like a trio of conjoined soup cans, balanced on pilings on a hillside in the Nunavut hamlet of Pond Inlet. The Montreal-born architect spent the past four years single-handedly building his tube house to suit – and tread lightly on – the polar environment.
This 1,100-square-foot “Inukshuk residence,” as Carbonnier calls it, is heated with a wood-pellet stove, fitted with a grey-water recycling system, built with metal posts and tanks scavenged from the dump, and partly powered by wind turbines and solar panels. Inside, the home is sleek, urban and minimalist. “That all comes from living on a boat,” he says. “You have to be very aware of your energy expenditures.” (Carbonnier is a sailing nut, and has navigated “many oceans” over his life.)
But it’s the home’s exterior that draws attention. Bizarre as it appears, its raised design and slick cylindrical form deflect the area’s notorious winds and allow interior heat to circulate more evenly than in conventional, boxy homes. As well, the house sits gingerly on the delicate tundra, mounted tripod-style on three “floating pod” foundations that Carbonnier dug (with a shovel and a pick) only a metre into the ground. “I wanted to get away from typical foundations,” he says. “They’re very destructive. Growth is very slow in the Arctic.”
Eye-catching and environmental, Carbonnier’s home is truly his castle. He’s a quiet, solitary type who relishes alone-time spent working on his labour-of-love. “From my balcony I can see the hamlet and the ocean, and the huge peaks of Bylot Island,” he says. “It’s quite pleasant.”
The floating abode
A Yellowknife couple creates a houseboat awash with character
When Edith Martel and Dave White commute home, they do it by canoe – a five-minute paddle from the dock in Yellowknife’s Old Town. Having bought an aging barge that buoyed an unfinished structure, they refurbished it into a floating chalet, with all the amenities and twice the charm of a landlocked home. Call it houseboat chic: “We’re both geologists, so we’re out in the field maybe 50 per cent of the time,” says Martel. “So we didn’t want our home to feel like camping.”
In their waterborne house the couple installed a heated shower and a composting toilet to sidestep the inconvenient “honey buckets” most other houseboaters employ. Other renovations included adding a woodstove with propane backup, installing three solar panels for electricity – and staking their home to the lake-bottom. “I actually get severe motion sickness, so we anchored the house with poles,” White says. “It doesn’t drift in the waves like the others.”
Martel and White’s 600-square-foot open-concept downstairs centres on a sturdy ladder, used to climb to a cozy 200-square-foot bedroom loft with sweeping views of Great Slave. A deck-top solarium lets the couple take in the evening summer sun, minus the bugs. But they’ve learned to keep their voices down in consideration of the strange acoustics of their aqueous neighbourhood. “See that houseboat way off near the distant island?” White says. “We can hear every word when he’s on the phone.”
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