HIP Boathouse is a wooden retreat located in Herman?s Island, Canada, designed in 2021 by Abbott Brown Architects.

Description
This site is located on Herman?s Island, on the South Shore of Nova Scotia along a section of remote, shoreline facing back into Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. At this remote location, along the forested west- facing beach edge of the lot they wanted to create both a functional space for boat storage and a leisurely, Zen place for connecting to the water, and the western sunsets. Planning restrictions limit ocean-side development to boathouses only. This restriction was embraced in the design, as a way of re- enforcing the elemental, maritime nature of the structure and the siting.
The location is remote, accessed via a private drive running back from the island?s traditionally settled south coastline to the more wild, forested north. In this context, there is a degree of critical dislocation from the established idea of Nova Scotian Boathouse, and its particular, strong formal lineage. Metaphorically, the journey west through the forest becomes a passage out of the deeply rooted architectural vernacular of Lunenburg County to a more primordial context where established formal imagery can be warped and re-imagined. In this way, the Boathouse design became a point of expressive re-interpretation and experimentation: Roof pitches are varied, with the west hip leaning more strongly out to sea, while the east maintains a human scale at the ramp ...