SONO is a minimalist residence located in Wentworth-North, Quebec, Canada, designed by Atelier Carle. The brief arrived with an unusual social constraint. Two friends wanted to share a secondary home in the Laurentian landscape without surrendering their independence – a directive that pushed Atelier Carle toward architecture organized around managed distance rather than conventional domestic openness. The result is a 214-square-meter structure that resolves cohabitation not through walls and locks but through the sequencing of space itself.
Three long concrete walls of varying heights define the approach before the building is even visible. Their scale reads against the landscape rather than against the body – they feel more like landform than architecture, anchoring the site with a permanence that the timber interior deliberately refuses. Reclaimed wood, sourced through Taylor Lukian, carries the grain and color of previous use, registering a different relationship to time. Where concrete fixes the building to its ground, reclaimed timber introduces material history and the suggestion of future adaptability. The two systems work against each other productively.
Inside, the program unfolds in terraces that follow the natural slope of the site, distributing rooms through a meandering sequence rather than a legible plan. No single room reveals the whole. Sightlines pool and terminate, acoustic environments fragment, and the two residents can inhabit the same house with genuine spatial autonomy. The kitchen breaks from this logic of separation – it opens completely onto the landscape, functioning as the one shared threshold between the domestic interior and the panorama outside.
