Project Tour Highlights:
Join us on a full walkthrough of the Winchester Boathouse on beautiful Lake Rosseau! This custom boathouse blends traditional Muskoka-inspired forms with sleek modern details—featuring a minimalist glass railing perfect for setting down your drink, a secure gangplank for lake jumps, expansive sliding doors and garage door for indoor-outdoor flow, a warm cedar soffit exterior, trimless corners, and a welcoming lower-level entertaining space with white oak cabinetry, boho vibes, bar area, game table, and stunning lake views. We incorporated a platform lift from Northshore Waterfront Solutions to keep the boat slip clean and sealed. Built in collaboration with Brian Strickland (contractor), Rockscape, and other talented trades.
Full Transcription:
Welcome to our Winchester boathouse. We’re going to have a little look around this project, but just to start, we have this beautiful landscaping transition from rockscape that transitions onto our boathouse rooftop deck.
As we move down the bridge here towards the rooftop deck, the one thing you’re going to notice right off the bat is we have an extremely thin railing. Our client came to us and said, ‘Hey Corbin, I really want to be able to put my beer on the railing or a glass of wine, but I want that sleek, minimal look of glass.’ And so that’s kind of how we came to this railing design.
The other thing that’s pretty common with a lot of boathouses is we have a lot of clients that want to have this gate area where they can jump off and jump into the lake. So on this project, we did a gangplank, but we also did a lock here. So we have a little bit of security that someone can’t just use it at their own free will, and our client can lock it whenever they need to.
Now, we’re going to head down to the lower part of the boathouse. One of the big things we wanted to do with this lower level boathouse is we wanted to have a great place for our clients to entertain. And so, we have two sliding doors here. The two panels slide to the one panel so our clients can open up this whole middle section.
The other thing that we really wanted to utilize on this project is kind of sandwich a bit of warmth on the exterior. So we have the wood natural tones of the dock, but then we also have the cedar soffit, and it just feels and kind of creates this warmth.
On this project, we wanted to mix the traditional form of the building with a lot of modern details. And so we have this trimless corner where we use this reveal to allow the siding to butt in, and it creates a bit more of an expansive wall of siding.
Moving down a little bit further, we have a garage door that can open up. This allows our client to see the expansive view of Lake Rosseau and really just open up this whole side of the boathouse.
Coming into the inside of our boathouse here, we have this great living area. We have a bar area allowing our clients to sit down here and have lunch. We have this great table that people can play games at or just hang out at.
We really wanted to utilize a bit of a boho vibe. And so with Hilltop Interiors and our kitchen company, Chervin, we utilized white oak cabinets and this very light colored dining table to really create a very clean and welcoming look and really create a place that you wanted to be in.
Transitioning over to the living area: Our client likes to watch golf and sports, and so we wanted to have a great place where they could hang out and still be on the water and still do that stuff. So we have a TV here, we have this beautiful furniture, and then obviously the gorgeous view of Lake Rosseau.
One of the key features of this boathouse is we’ve actually used a platform lift from Northshore Waterfront Solutions. And this allows us to keep the boathouse clean and really seal the dock and the boat slip area of the boathouse. Thanks for watching our video on our Winchester boathouse.
Thanks to the team that put this together—so we have Brian Strickland, the contractor; we have Rockscape and the other various trades involved in this project. Check out our other videos, and we’ll see you on the next one.
