Project Name: Camera House

Location: Pemberton Valley, British Columbia, Canada

Design Team: Leckie Studio Architecture + Design

Total Floor Area: 2,650 ft²

Completion: 2022

Photography: Ema Peter

Feature: Leckie Studio Architecture + Design's "Camera House" demonstrates how precision optical spatial strategies and curatorial visual choreography can transform a two-bedroom residence into an architectural apparatus that captures and directs natural light and landscape experience.

This 2,650-square-foot residence, situated on a sloped five-acre site in the Pemberton Valley, is positioned at the foot of the Lillooet Range and bracketed by the Garibaldi Range. The home frames a swimming pool, outdoor dining area, and a detached workshop, drawing focus to the rich natural surroundings of the Pacific Northwest. Rather than displaying the landscape through conventional panoramic glass boxes, the architecture operates through an optical spatial framework that selectively captures and presents the surrounding wilderness beauty with camera-like precision.

The project's most compelling design feature lies in its conceptual approach inspired by camera mechanics. The house acts as a spatial device that captures and directs light toward carefully chosen surfaces. This design offers a curated experience of the landscape, encompassing both its dramatic scale and intimate details, allowing the site to be perceived "through a lens." This deliberate selectivity creates a more profound and contemplative relationship with the landscape than traditional curtain wall architecture typically allows.

Leckie Studio's design language fluently expresses a three-focal-depth spatial layering strategy: foreground, midground, and background. In the distance to the south, peaks from the Garibaldi Range including Ts'zil (2,591m), Hibachi (2,603m), and Gravell (2,802m) form the background. Owl Ridge (Lil'wat, 2,073m) rises to the northeast as a defining midground feature. The foreground is marked by mature trees and moss-covered boulders, some of which have rested on the site for thousands of years.

Most remarkably, the architects functionally and emotionally anchor the entire design through four interlocking volumes. Each volume is topped with a sloped roof and clerestory windows oriented to the north and east. These openings alternate between specific and abstract view corridors, framing Owl Ridge or offering glimpses of sky and treetops. Inside, ceilings are sculpted to guide light and view lines through the space, creating interiors that shift in mood with changes in daylight and weather.

Spatial organization strategies permeate the entire design process. Camera House transforms architecture into a tool of perception, simultaneously sheltering and revealing, directing attention to the ephemeral qualities of light and landscape. The result is a home deeply attuned to its setting, where experience is shaped moment by moment, like an image coming into focus. Every decision is intended to evoke acute awareness of the environment's ephemeral and dramatic qualities. The outcome is a compact wilderness retreat that transforms simple dwelling functions into continuous acts of observation, not about occupying the landscape, but about perceiving it anew through architectural framing.

Design Team: Leckie Studio Architecture + Design was founded in 2015 as a platform to craft singular, thought-provoking, and imaginative architectural work. The studio is conceived as a vehicle for creative speculation, combining architecture and creative entrepreneurship to expand the boundaries of traditional architecture practice through research, client commissions, and self-initiated projects. The firm engages in the practice of design across a range of scale and media, including architecture, interiors, installations, and product design. It is a young, ambitious practice that seeks to initiate cultural change through design, challenging assumptions and seeking unexpected outcomes.

Based in Vancouver with a field studio in Tofino, the firm embodies a distinctly Pacific Northwest, or Cascadian, sensibility. The practice is rooted in this region, operating in the margins with a perspective that positions the work regionally rather than nationally. Living and practicing in the Pacific Northwest has always led the team to feel as if they are practicing in the margins, both literally and figuratively. From a practice standpoint, the studio has intentionally sought out unconventional opportunities, at times creating these opportunities through experimental or self-initiated work. Unconventional opportunities also tend to lie in plain sight, in engaging the built environment that the wider profession of architecture often overlooks, examples including multi-generational housing, affordable housing, architectural adaptability, and do-it-yourself construction.

Leckie Studio's methodology is process-driven, hands-on, and highly collaborative. The team rigorously explores ideas, values experimentation, and engages in the habit of testing-to-failure. The studio self-performs all digital visualizations, builds physical models, and creates scale mock-ups. The studio understands architecture as a framework to connect people more closely with the experience of context and a larger sense of community. The team seeks to create architecture that instills a sense of wonder in the universe and inspires a sense of place. The firm is mindful of the materiality of projects, sourcing locally wherever possible. In a way, the studio's early work can be considered as the embodiment of its network of friends and collaborators, those who lend their talents in the production of the work.

The studio's portfolio of project work is intentionally diversified in both typology and scale. The approach to creative process is based on creative problem-solving and design-thinking, understanding that a clear formulation of the design question is the first step in developing a design solution. This peripheral positioning has proven strategically productive, earning significant recognition including the 2025 World Architecture Festival Award for Completed Buildings: House & Villa (Urban/Suburban), the 2025 Architecture Foundation of BC (AFBC) Design Excellence Award for Monos Vancouver, the 2024 Canadian Architect Award of Merit for the Tofino Fish Pier, the 2023 Canadian Architect Award of Merit for Addapt, the 2023 Architecture Foundation of BC (AFBC) Design Excellence Awards for the UBC Arts Student Centre and Camera House, the 2022 Architectural Record Design Vanguard Award, the 2021 AFBC Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia Award in Architecture for Full House, and the 2021 RAIC Emerging Architectural Practice Award.

The studio's work has been featured in numerous publications including FRAME, Arcade, Wallpaper, Azure, and Canadian Architect, among others. Leckie Studio Architecture + Design's work demonstrates that contemporary architectural excellence emerges not from metropolitan centers alone but from practices deeply attuned to regional landscapes, materiality, and community-focused design thinking. Its portfolio consistently pursues architecture that instills wonder while maintaining rigorous attention to craft, context, and environmental responsibility.