Project Name: Belfountain House

Location: Belfountain, Ontario, Canada

Design Team: UUfie

Area: 240 m²

Year: 2025

Photography: Ema Peter Photography

Design Features: Nestled within the steep, forested terrain of the Niagara Escarpment in Belfountain, Ontario, Belfountain House by Toronto-based studio UUfie is a four-level residence that transforms a modest 1970s chalet into a 400-square-metre family home of remarkable spatial intelligence.

Rather than expanding outward, the architects shaped the project through subtraction, reorganization, and sectional precision. A single elongated roof stretches across the hillside, gathering all levels of living beneath one continuous span — a gesture that unifies the home while allowing it to dissolve quietly into the tree canopy above.

What distinguishes the project is its treatment of movement as architecture. Circulation through the house unfolds like a hike through the surrounding forest — sequential, episodic, and atmospheric. From the compressed timber-lined mudroom at entry, the sequence opens dramatically into a soaring living room anchored by a fireplace, where exposed rafters reach toward the canopy and diagonal red steel beams introduce a bold structural counterpoint. Suspended overhead, a large net serves simultaneously as barrier, hammock, and inhabitable surface — one of the project's most inventive gestures, dissolving the boundary between play and space.

As the house descends into the slope, the architecture becomes progressively more embedded in the terrain. Two contrasting stair elements — one carved into the hillside, the other suspended lightly above it — create distinct landscape encounters at each level. Lower floors accommodate a sauna, gym, and a guest suite wrapped in angled polycarbonate that glows like a lantern at night.

Throughout, reclaimed elm, local stone, stucco, and radiant concrete floors root the project in its woodland setting. Durable and tactile, these materials are chosen not for preservation but for full inhabitation — a home designed to absorb the marks of family life and deepen with time.

Design Team: Founded in Tokyo in 2009 and relocated to Toronto in 2013, UUfie is an architecture and design studio led by principals Irene Gardpoit and Eiri Ota. The practice operates across residential, cultural, and commercial scales, with completed work spanning North America, Asia, and Europe.

Gardpoit, a licensed Canadian architect, trained under Pritzker Prize laureate Arata Isozaki before co-founding the studio. Her experience encompasses major institutional commissions for the Aga Khan Foundation across Central Asia and the Qatar Convention Center. Ota, a licensed First Class Architect in Japan, brings a parallel depth of practice developed through projects for Louis Vuitton and large-scale masterplanning work at UNESCO World Heritage sites. Together, their complementary backgrounds — rooted in both Japanese precision and Canadian pragmatism — shape a studio defined by rigorous inquiry, material sensitivity, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

UUfie has received the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York, the RAIC Emerging Architectural Practice Award, and the Ronald J. Thom Award for Early Design Achievement from the Canada Council for the Arts. Notable built works include Ports 1961 in Shanghai and Printemps Haussmann in Paris. The studio's approach consistently prioritises the relationship between space, material, and inhabitation — producing architecture that is considered, durable, and quietly transformative.