The Summer 2025 issue of Style at Home Magazine ran a feature on the Chown Boathouse under the title “The Great Escape.” It was the kind of coverage that captures a project at the right moment — the boathouse photographed in full summer use, the deck occupied, the water just right.
Style at Home has a particular eye for spaces that blur the line between inside and out. The Chown Boathouse made sense for that lens. The entire upper level reads as a covered outdoor room. The deck overhangs the water. The interior follows the same logic — open, oriented toward the lake, nothing extraneous.
The feature centred Michele from Bespoke Living Interiors, whose interior work brought the upper level together. This is how the best boathouse projects work — the architecture sets the frame, the interior design fills it. Michele’s approach kept the palette restrained and the furnishings durable, appropriate for a space that spends half its life in full Muskoka sun.
CPD handled the structure, the envelope, the decks, and the relationship to the water. Bespoke handled the surfaces, the seating, the light. The result is a space that reads as one thing, not two trades working in parallel.
Two pages in the Summer 2025 issue. The full feature is below.
Press features are earned by projects that photograph well because they were designed well. The Chown Boathouse was built to be used — the deck, the slips, the upper level are all functional, all resolved. That the camera picks that up is a byproduct of the design thinking, not a separate effort.
The Great Escape. A good name for a space that does exactly that.
