Project Name: Counter-Slope House

Location: Potton, Quebec, Canada

Design Team: YH2 Architecture

Floor Area: 4,530 ft² (420 m²)

Year of Completion: 2024

Photography: Maxime Brouillet

Design Features: Sited on the southern shore of Lake Memphremagog in Potton, Quebec, the Counter-Slope House by Montreal-based YH2 Architecture is a deeply considered response to one of Canada's most geographically and atmospherically intense landscapes. Completed in 2024 across 4,530 square feet, the residence navigates a steep slope frequently cast in the shadow of surrounding mountains with deliberate restraint. Rather than imposing upon the terrain, the project emerges as an exercise in co-habitation, a building that occupies the land with discretion and reverence.

The project's defining architectural move is its fragmented composition of two interrelated volumes, each crowned with a distinctive dual-pitched roof combining a primary pitch and a counter-pitch. This morphological gesture creates a quiet formal dialogue with the angular geometries of the mountain landscape, while simultaneously reducing the perceived scale of the overall construction. The house does not sit upon the hillside so much as it settles into it, as though it has always belonged to the topography.

Perhaps the most inventive spatial act of the project is the transformation of the main volume's roof into a terrace-belvedere. On a site governed entirely by descent, this rare horizontal plane functions as both an arrival threshold and an elevated viewpoint, redefining the act of entering a home as one of landscape contemplation and spatial decompression. The main body of the house unfolds along a natural plateau, following the terrain to minimise excavation and promote passive integration. Living spaces open entirely toward the lake through expansive glazed apertures, with interior floors extending outward as terraces, dissolving the boundary between inside and outside into a continuous sensorial engagement with the landscape.

Materiality is central to the project's contextual strategy. Naturally weathered cedar wraps the exterior, harmonising chromatically with the mineral and vegetal tones of the shoreline. Inside, white oak surfaces introduce warmth and domestic calm, providing a measured contrast to the untamed presence of the landscape beyond. Precisely calibrated black architectural elements punctuate the spatial sequence, operating as visual instruments that frame views and curate the occupant's relationship to depth, space, and the pictorial dimension of the lake with near cinematic precision. The Counter-Slope House stands as a meditation on landscape through architecture, achieving through a calibrated tension between presence and absence, affirmation and humility, something rare: a building that reveals and heightens one's experience of place rather than simply occupying it.

Design Team: Founded in Montreal in 1994 by architects Marie-Claude Hamelin and Loukas Yiacouvakis, YH2 Architecture has spent three decades establishing itself as one of Canada's most consistently awarded and critically respected residential architecture practices. Both founding partners trained at the Université de Montréal and carried formative professional influences into the studio. Yiacouvakis undertook architectural internships with Melvin Charney and Mario Biocca, accumulating significant expertise in urban design and spatial theory. Hamelin engaged with international pedagogical programmes, including a workshop led by Daniel Libeskind in Italy and an academic residency at the University of Israel.

The studio's foundational philosophy frames architecture as the art of place-making, a creative and transformative tool through which spatial reality is rigorously reinvented. YH2 deliberately maintains a selective project load, ensuring that each commission receives the sustained, full attention of its principal team. Every project is developed holistically, spanning site integration, conceptual design, construction documentation, architectural detailing, and interior design. The practice's formal language is disciplined and economical: nothing is superfluous, and every element must contribute to the integrity of the overall composition.

This rigorous methodology has earned YH2 repeated recognition from the Ordre des architectes du Québec, including Award of Excellence wins in the single-family residential category for projects such as Wooden Blocks and La Colombière, as well as multiple Grands Prix du Design honours across residential and wood valorisation categories. The studio has also received international recognition, including the Grand International Prize in the residential architecture category. Led today by its two founding principals, Marie-Claude Hamelin and Loukas Yiacouvakis, the practice continues to advance an architectural discourse defined by place sensitivity, spatial precision and material integrity. The Counter-Slope House design team further comprised Karl Choquette and Lisa Busmey, reflecting the firm's deeply collaborative approach to every project it undertakes.