The owner’s tour | A story of swimming pools and peaks

Owners open the doors of their exceptional residence to us, offered on the resale market.

Sylvain Sarrazin
The Press

There are the big ostentatious cabins whose main purpose is to impress them from the street. And others, no less sumptuous, which discreetly blend into the decor, revealing their true charm only to guests who walk through the doors. This is the case of this impressive chameleon-house lurking in a forest at the foot of Mont Saint-Bruno, whose history is rooted in a swimming pool, right in the middle of the peaks.

From the road, it almost looks like a one-storey house, not so imposing. It hides its finery well, since in reality, this colossus of 75 feet (almost 23 meters) rises on four floors, the full extent of which can only be taken from the back of the building, from of a magnificent Asian garden backing onto the forest.

The interior is no less breathtaking, with grandiose volumes for each room, the list of which goes on endlessly. But what distinguishes the residence above all is that it was built with its feet in the water. No, we are not talking about a flood zone at all; the charming creek laid out in the backyard is anything but threatening. We are talking here about the 20-meter indoor swimming pool on the ground floor, where the project took root.

“As a physical educator, I taught in a high school where there was a pool that long. When we had the means to build this house, the first mandate given to the architect was to have a swimming pool of the same size to be able to swim daily. This is what determined the choice of the dimensions of the land and the house,” explains Richard, current co-owner with his wife Mona. Together, they built the home of their dreams between 2009 and 2011, after a whole year of planning and reflection.

Knock on wood

If the swimming pool is well hidden, the second salient feature of the foyer is obvious from the entrance: it is the main living room, a true masterpiece with gigantic volumes, with windows reaching 28 feet, or 8.5 meters! The idea: to offer the feeling of being nestled in the heart of a wooded area. The effect: admirable, the surrounding trees seem to invite themselves into the room. “The objective was to have land that would allow us to be completely isolated in the forest, and whose orientation would allow us to have almost continuous sunshine, while maintaining access to city services. We wanted no room to give the impression of being in a basement, ”says the couple.

And rooms, it is linked to the shovel (bedrooms, office, projection room, recreation room, gymnasium, cellars, walk-in closets, spa, six-car garage, etc.), built, arranged and modeled with taste and a constant concern to connect them to the outside, thanks to balconies and terraces running all around the building. In addition, many spaces are converted into autonomous or more intimate areas, for example by means of sliding dividers.

The residence is also intended to be a high place of conviviality, with a high-end kitchen (there too, a sliding panel can separate it from the dining room), a heated terrace or the possibility of opening the French windows all around. from the swimming pool and use the equipped outdoor kitchen, giving everything a Californian air.

Geothermal energy and heated floors

In presenting the house, broker Charles-Alexandre Sylvestre insists on the quality and durability of the materials and equipment, combining reinforced concrete, steel roofing, natural stone or wood-look composite planks. Ditto for the interior linings, whose design has remained in fashion; there is exclusively white oak for all the woodwork, from the frames to the floor.

A very wide range of options has been installed, from home automation systems to 3D projectors, from lifts to pumping systems for swimming pools and ponds. “Of the 14,000 square feet of the residence, all of the floors are heated with glycol, including the outdoor galleries. The only exception remains the cellar, which represents 100 square feet,” the broker points out. Of course, it is conceivable that the residence has an energy-intensive tendency, partly offset by the installation of eight geothermal wells.

Very high-end and of high stature, the residence also displays a price that makes you dizzy, approaching 11 million, which puts it in the crosshairs of big dreamers and, more concretely, successful business people. Two categories to which belongs Richard, from a modest background, but who wanted, when success knocked on his door, to sketch the house of his dreams in complete complicity with his wife, a professional designer.

It all started with the swimming pool, and today it all comes back to it: after a serious injury while skiing, its very sporty co-owner had to give up swimming. This deprivation, combined with the departure of the children from the household and the couple’s aspirations to reconnect permanently with the joys of travel, hastened its marketing. If a sale were to take place, it would be the largest transaction on the South Shore, according to the broker.