Twenty + Change: Laura Killam Architecture

Laura Killam’s Vancouver-based design studio emerged in a deeply personal and serendipitous way when she returned home to the British Columbia coast, after stints in Los Angeles and Montreal, to raise her family.

When she started building seasonal homes along the Salish Sea, the first six were for members of the community she grew up within, on an island in Desolation Sound. This allowed her to establish an approach to designing and building for wild, remote sites. Her clients trusted her to create living spaces that would enrich—and be enriched by—their settings. As she puts it, “the building plays second to the natural environment.”

Killam begins by carefully reading a site. She returns often—as often as deadlines and budget will allow, but certainly every couple of months—to spend time studying the terrain, the views, the sun, and the wind. For one thing, the right building site has to be found before design begins. Killam is rarely working in a context where property boundaries, zoning, or setbacks are at play, so natural criteria determine siting, while other constraints are discovered through the process.

Designing for seasonal living allows Killam to guide her clients to build less and think in terms of efficiency—minimizing their footprint, going light on heating needs, and so on. Practicality also guides her material choices. While the wood panelling that finishes most of her interior walls is an undeniably aesthetic choice, it is also a pragmatic one: in a house left unheated all winter, drywall is riskier, because it doesn’t breathe as well.

Killam’s designs are also shaped by working on sites that don’t necessarily have truck access for construction, with materials and crews coming in by barge or helicopter. Through this lens, designing with interior wood panelling means that the work can be done by the same finish carpenters who are already on site.

Over the years, Killam has come to collaborate closely with a craftsman and fourth-generation Cortes Island resident as her primary builder. This relationship allows her to use architectural drawings to communicate intent and start a conversation with him, rather than to resolve all the details.

Beyond pragmatic thinking, designing for seasonal living is an opportunity to think more flexibly about space, and to move as many functions as possible outside a home’s walls. For Killam, this is where moments of bliss are created. She often reserves the best spot in the project for an outdoor shower.

The most important aspects of her work, says Killam, are providing pleasure and helping families plan houses that can grow with them over generations.

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: Laura Killam Architecture appeared first on Canadian Architect.