Lantern House: Constructing an Urban Sanctuary in Vancouver

Clients wishing to isolate themselves and contemplate daily life without leaving the city present a significant design challenge, requiring a delicate balance between the home’s inward focus and its lively contribution to the surroundings. With Lantern House, located in a semi-urban part of Vancouver, Leckie Studio Architecture + Design’s design harnesses this tension to create a rigorous and richly sensory project that forms a personal sanctuary.

Despite the lack of ground-floor windows, the house takes its responsibilities to the street seriously through its raw and local materials. The design ignores the formal conventions of its context, but the architect assembled roughcast stucco, exposed concrete, and regional cedar with a care that elevates these materials and gives the house a strong sense of belonging and a foundational calm for this sanctuary.

Inside, the house follows a similarly critical approach to creating a domestic sanctuary, investigating from first principles the spatial composition that would support the residents’ daily lives. The result is a quiet, focused set of core spaces, executed in raw materials and neutral tones, washed in soft light. With a small footprint, the interior feels smaller and more intimate, enhancing the feeling of protection.

The entry consists of a sequence of two rooms: a vestibule and then a mudroom, where light from a narrow window falls on a simple bench. This pair of dark, quiet spaces forms an experiential threshold, presiding over the sensory transition between the outside world and the internal sanctuary.

A turn leads to the heart of the home, an open space. A polished concrete slab navigates down with the site’s slope, defining a “sunken” living room and then the kitchen area. Above the living room, a full-story-high square light well bathes the central space in changing sky brightness, while the wooden sides of the opening diffuse the light and soften the acoustics.

High windows on the second floor provide privacy for the bedrooms, and the ceiling height and doors give the rooms, despite their modest size, a feeling of grandeur and calm. The two bathrooms continue the house’s subtle play of light and texture, with hidden apertures sending whispers of light through the walls. These meticulous details represent the holistic approach that produces a place of coherence and serenity a true urban sanctuary.

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

This article explores the Lantern House in Vancouver as a case study in designing a modern urban sanctuary, highlighting its use of raw, regional materials, a deliberate spatial sequence, and controlled natural light to create a profound sense of refuge and tranquility within a dense urban fabric. A pointed critique is that the article, while beautifully describing the sensory experience, occasionally leans into architectural jargon that may obscure the very accessible and human feeling of sanctuary it aims to celebrate for a non-specialist reader. Nonetheless, the piece succeeds powerfully in its core argument by meticulously connecting every design decision from the windowless ground floor to the hidden light slots back to the overarching, and ultimately achieved, goal of crafting a cohesive and serene domestic haven.