Project Name: Maison Aubé

Location: Saint-Eustache, Quebec, Canada

Design Team: YH2 Architecture

Total Floor Area: 358.5 m² (3,860 ft²)

Completion: 2025

Photography: Maxime Brouillet

General Contractor: SMS Turcot Construction

Landscape Architecture: Libre cour + LN Paysage

Design Features: Canadian architecture studio YH2 Architecture has completed Maison Aube, a masterful restoration and contemporary extension of a heritage home dating back to 1811 in Saint-Eustache, Quebec, situated on the banks of the Riviere des Mille Iles. The project stands as a compelling meditation on architectural memory, demonstrating how history and modernity can coexist with sensitivity and precision.

Originally built on the banks of the Riviere des Mille Iles, the patriot's home had accumulated decades of fragmented interventions that obscured its original character, while remaining inhabited by the same family across multiple generations. YH2 Architecture approached the project with rigorous restraint, stripping back accumulated additions to restore the exterior envelope to its elemental purity. The reinstatement of original proportions in the window openings, the revival of the cedar shingle roof, and the careful exposure of interior stone walls and structural beams collectively reawaken the authenticity that time had buried. A new double-height space restructures the main living area and offers a fresh spatial reading of the roof structure overhead.

The defining design move lies in the relationship between the restored heritage structure and its newly conceived contemporary extension. Rather than imposing a contrasting gesture, YH2 designed a deliberately discreet volume that nestles among the mature trees, expanding and contracting to respect the natural landscape. Clad in ebony-stained cedar and dark wood, topped with a pebble roof, the extension achieves a rare tonal harmony with its surroundings. A central ramp following the natural slope of the terrain organises the interior sequence, grounding the new construction in the topography of the site.

Connecting old and new is a glazed passageway, a luminous threshold that frames the dialogue between heritage and contemporary life. The result is a home that operates as a coherent whole, where architecture, landscape, and generational memory converge. Maison Aube does not preserve the past by freezing it but by allowing it to evolve, ensuring that a two-century legacy continues to be lived, reinterpreted, and handed forward.

Design Team: Founded in Montreal in 1994 by architects Marie-Claude Hamelin and Loukas Yiacouvakis, YH2 Architecture has established itself as one of Quebec's most distinguished design practices over the course of three decades. Operating under the conviction that architecture is fundamentally the art of place-making, the studio approaches each commission as both a creative and transformative act, one that seeks to reinvent reality through disciplined spatial thinking.

Both founding partners trained at the Universite de Montreal and bring a depth of intellectual formation to their practice. Hamelin studied under Daniel Libeskind in Italy and completed an internship at the University of Israel, while Yiacouvakis trained alongside the influential Melvin Charney, contributing to the seminal urban study of the Faubourg Saint-Laurent district. Together, they co-founded YH2 and have led the studio without interruption since its inception.

Central to the firm's methodology is a rigorous, holistic engagement with every dimension of a project, from contextual integration and conceptual design to construction documentation, architectural detailing, and interior design. YH2 deliberately limits its project volume to ensure that each commission receives the full and undivided attention of its founding partners. This commitment to precision and intentionality has earned the studio an extensive record of national and international awards across residential, commercial, and heritage categories, including the Prix d'excellence en architecture from the Ordre des architectes du Quebec, gold prizes at the Grands prix du Design, and multiple recognitions for the valorisation of wood in architecture.