The Ucluelet Residence
NEW BUILD · OCEANFRONT · UCLUELET, BC
A new-build oceanfront custom home with two rental suites on a spectacular coastal lot in Ucluelet, BC — designed to turn every constraint of this demanding site into a moment of architectural delight. Currently in design development.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
A Custom Home Built for One of BC’s Most Extraordinary Sites
The owners had secured a spectacular oceanfront lot in Ucluelet — one of the most dramatic and demanding coastal sites on Vancouver Island — and were determined not to squander it. The brief was ambitious: a primary residence for a couple, alongside two separate rental suites, on a site governed by strict flood bylaws, a 10-metre minimum habitable floor height, and the constant challenge of designing for what may be the rainiest corner of British Columbia.
The result is a custom home design concept that absorbs every constraint and transforms it into character — a building where the challenges of the site became the architecture itself.
TYPE OF PROJECT: Custom Home — New Build · Two Rental Suites
LOCATION: Ucluelet, BC · Vancouver Island
SITE: Oceanfront · Odyssey Lane
DESIGNER: Leo Chester, Kerr Design Build
STATUS: In Design Development — Pre-Permit
SIZE: Three Residences — Main Floor + Two Upper Suites
Arrival as an Event — Every Single Time
The guiding ambition behind this Ucluelet custom home design is architectural delight — a building so engaging in form that arrival itself becomes an event, stirring a sense of excitement and wonder every time you approach.
A dramatic footbridge carries you in over the landscape from Odyssey Lane. A sweeping gull-wing roof announces the building against the Pacific sky. Generous covered decks invite year-round outdoor living, even in a famously wet climate. And at the rear, a vine-laden trellis deck creates an almost Mediterranean warmth — a covered outdoor room that turns the site’s wild weather into a pleasure rather than a problem.
Three households share one building — but each arrives with complete privacy and dignity. No one feels like a tenant in someone else’s home.
Where Constraint Became Character
The Lifted Podium & Undercroft The flood bylaw requiring habitable space no lower than 10 metres above sea level could have produced a blunt, ungainly base. Instead it gave rise to the building’s most practical innovation — a robust board-formed concrete podium housing a sheltered undercroft for cars, kayaks, storage and an outdoor shower. Guests arrive and park at the front. The owners descend into the building itself. Practical problem and poetic arrival, resolved as one gesture.
The Timber Exoskeleton & Gull-Wing Roof Slender timber columns form an exoskeleton that wraps the building — doing real structural work while sheltering the covered walkways, shaping the corners of the gull-wing roof, and giving each of the three residences its own dry, covered entrance. In Ucluelet’s rain, this is not a decorative gesture. It is the difference between a home that works and one that doesn’t.
The Covered Decks & Circular Skylights Each upper suite has its own generous covered deck with a hot tub positioned beneath a circular skylight — so you can soak and stargaze on a clear Ucluelet night, or watch the Pacific weather roll in from the comfort of warm water. The main rear deck is the showpiece: a vine-laden trellis room, carefully screened for privacy, that captures the warmth and character of the West Coast at its finest.
PROJECT TEAM
Leo Chester · Senior Designer
Leo Chester is a Senior Designer at Kerr Design Build with 29 years of experience designing custom homes and contemporary interiors across Greater Vancouver.
