i like the contrast of the very modern-feeling white areas with the very warm and cabin-y feeling wooden areas. this is beautiful.

Those stairs are cool!

desing is very good but used a lot of lumbers on stairs.

So let me figure this one out....this is a good use of wood how?

So instead of cutting a log into smaller sections to efficiently maximize the resource, why don't we just cut the log lengthwise and use the entire thing for a stair tread! That is VERY WASTEFUL. You could of almost built the entire stair out of just one tread!!!!

also, judging by the tightness of the grain on the wood patterns, it looks like this wood is probably old growth, also a horribly environmentally destructive resource.

Just because trees grow back, it does not mean that old growth forests do! Wood is only sustainable when it is either recycled, or gathered from 'tree farms' and used in a smart and efficient way.

I agree with Carl.

I'm with Carl, too! Using old growth forest as interior design is more robber baron than treehugger.

What this needs is some burnt orange carpet, avocado appliances, and a big pail of vomit to empty over the whole thing. It's as aesthetically nightmarish as it is wasteful of resources... as well as a waste of visual and physical space.

I agree with carl, I'd even go further; making something look nice on a huge budget and with scant regard for resource consumption is very easy and does not demonstrate good design. It may produce a desirable object but that is down to the quality of materials and their connotations of permanence and masculinity in this case. bad design.

I agree with carl, I'd even go further; making something look nice on a huge budget and with scant regard for resource consumption is very easy and does not demonstrate good design. It may produce a desirable object but that is down to the quality of materials and their connotations of permanence and masculinity in this case. bad design.

As a sawyer of reusable lumber I can say that the wood used in the stairs is good for nothing else except firewood. The cracks and core rot make them unsable if cut any smaller. As for the rest of the design, well, beauty is in the eye of the owner.

Did any of you stop to think that a lot of old wood used in architectural design to day is actually reclaimed timber from old mills, barns and other building that have been torn down. They tree may be old, but it may have also been cut down over 200 years ago, Quebec is an old city, do a little research and know all the facts before you start being so critical.

sure, wood may be recycled, which is great, but there is nothing that says that the wood in this project was.

plus, the logs used for the stair treads are cracked and checked, but that could of happened during drying. that is not a standard size, you can't go to home depot and buy logs like that. who knows when and where the checks and cracks happened, or where they came from. they could of been cast off or 2nds....but if the cracks happened in the logs because they tried to kiln dry wood that big, then this is a poor use of wood.
i'm sure the architects didn't look for wood with cracks in it for stairs, no one wants giant splinters in their feet, so the idea that these logs are cast offs makes me suspicious. i'm guessing they were special orders.

but i could be wrong.

I disagree with many of the complaints about lumber use in the stairs. The treads were created using the heartwood core of the trunk, which generally has a high pith content and consequently is undesirable for woodworking.

Heartwood centers aren't very expensive and consequently are often used in other applications, such as dunnage/bracing in the shipping sector. If you have the chance, take a look at a thicker boards on a pallet or a flatbed tractor-trailer's wooden bracing used to support the freight. They're 4"x4" heartwood cores, typically Oak.

These boards cannot be resawn into board lumber, as was suggested previously because the resulting grain would be weak or warp aggressively. They wouldn't finish well either because of the aforementioned high pith content.

That said, I think the architect made an interesting use of materials, ecologically and financially.

it's wasteful simply because it's phatically and ostentatiously Hip and will be completely out of style in two years, which will no doubt necessitate a complete redesign. more materials wasted, and who knows whether the owners will recycle? my guess is "not," because in two years greenwashing as a trend will have faded.

the contrast of materials is indeed interesting, but uncomfortably ugly.

Too bad many people don't realize the many uses of bamboo. Havestable every 4 years, one hectare produces up to 10,000 new plants per year, some species grows to 8 inches in diameter and 90 feet tall, it's much stronger than wood in comparable sizes, grows in poor soils and fixes lots of nitrogen,and if you look at the website below, you can see what can be done with it for construction of homes and structures. Unfortunately, the fools in the U.S. government don't allow it to be used for home construction in the continental U.S. even though homes built in Colombia are still standing after 100 years.
Typical U.S. political shortsightedness and corrupt lobbying by the big timber companies.

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