Location: Wentworth-Nord, Canada

Design Team: Atelier Carle

Area: 214 m²

Year: 2025

Lead Architects: Isaniel Lévesque and Alain Carle

Design Team: James Jabbour and Starr Wang

Technical Team: Baptiste Balbrick and Sarah Mei Mousseau

General Contractor: Metric Construction Inc.

Structural Engineering: VCMa Engineering consultants

Geotechnical Engineering: Ingénat Engineering consultants

Photography: Félix Michaud

Design Features: SONO House sits in Wentworth-Nord in Quebec's Laurentian landscape. Atelier Carle begins not with the familiar idea of a solitary retreat, but with an unusual domestic brief: two friends wanted to share one mountain house without being required to share every part of daily life. The architecture therefore uses distance, turns and partial encounters to support closeness without constant overlap.

Three board-formed concrete walls of different heights appear before the interiors. Scaled to the terrain, they compress arrival into a narrow opening and anchor the house to rock and woodland. Beyond this weighty threshold, the material register shifts to timber structure, glass and soft northern light. The passage from concrete permanence to an open, adaptable wooden framework becomes the project's clearest spatial transition.

The plan never gives away the whole house at once. Rooms unfold as platforms following the slope, with turns, offsets and screened views creating visual and acoustic distance between shared and private areas. The kitchen opens fully to the northern panorama as a common centre, while living rooms and bedrooms receive distinct frames of the forest. Being together is not equated with occupying one continuously exposed scene.

Timber carries this more flexible form of occupation. Exposed beams and columns, dark hemlock surfaces and glazed edges form a legible constructional order. Hemlock sourced from land near the project is used in the structure, columns, fascias and north facade. The house is anchored directly to existing bedrock without blasting or major excavation, allowing the slope to continue shaping floor levels, sightlines and the rhythm between rooms.

SONO ultimately turns shared living into a spatial negotiation. Concrete establishes lasting boundaries; timber leaves room for adaptation; and the meandering sequence lets intimacy move between approach and retreat. Rather than projecting a fixed image of a mountain house, the project asks how bodies can inhabit changing light, material, sound and landscape while maintaining the measure that life together requires.

Design Team: Atelier Carle is a Montreal-based architectural practice founded by Alain Carle, whose work spans more than three decades. In 2023 the studio entered a new phase through partnerships with long-standing collaborators. It is now led by Carle together with Abel Bravo Muñoz, Alexandre Lemoyne, Gabriel Ostiguy and Isaniel Lévesque, working across residential, commercial and interior projects.

The studio treats architecture as a perceptual practice grounded in what a natural or urban setting already offers. Its small-workshop culture depends on close exchange with clients, builders and consultants, avoiding a predetermined identity in favour of a project-specific order shaped by constraints, craft and participation.

Atelier Carle received the 2023 Architecture MasterPrize Firm of the Year award and has also been recognised by the Ordre des architectes du Québec, the Chicago Athenaeum and the Shenzhen Design Award. SONO was led by Alain Carle and project architect Isaniel Lévesque, with James Jabbour, Starr Wang, Baptiste Balbrick and Sarah Mei Mousseau.