Calgary's northwest edge is where the city starts to give way to something older. Grasshopper Hill is not a park in the manicured sense. It is a remnant, a piece of native prairie that has held its ground against the slow advance of the grid. The Hill House sits at its periphery, taking its cues from what it finds there rather than imposing something foreign upon it.
The site drops fourteen metres from street to lane across a standard city parcel, the kind of condition most builders would level and forget. Here, the slope became the architecture. The building steps down with the land, each level independently articulated, the whole composition moving through the site the way a natural outcropping does: without apology, and without waste.
The concept was simple and stubborn. A jagged boulder emerging from prairie grass, a form that reads not as a building placed upon the landscape but as something the hillside produced on its own terms. Natural stone cladding reinforces this at every scale. Arriving at the front door means descending several metres below grade, the house gradually revealing itself as the ground falls away. From the street, it offers little. From within, it opens completely toward the city skyline, the parkland to the east, and the particular quality of light that comes from knowing exactly where you are on a hill.
Net-zero shaped the building from the outside in. A sealed, performative envelope and the desire to borrow long views of the Calgary skyline are, in principle, at odds with one another. The Hill House resolves this carefully, treating every opening as something to be earned, and arriving at an architecture more grounded and material for it. Ultra-airtight construction, exceptional insulation, and triple-pane fibreglass windows form the passive foundation. A 90-panel solar array, cold-climate heat pumps, battery storage, and rainwater capture extend the ambition further. The home produces what it consumes.
Inside, the same reductive logic carries through. Timber, plaster, leather, and natural stone, materials chosen for their durability, their honesty, and their freedom from the chemical compounds that compromise so many contemporary interiors. The spaces are warm without being decorative, calm without being sparse.
At the southern end of the parcel, the laneway house sits above a lane-facing garage with a private terrace oriented toward the city. Compact in area but generous in outlook, it shares the formal and material language of the main house while maintaining a character entirely its own. The garden between uses the fall of the land rather than walls to create separation, and the laneway slips clear of the main house view corridor so that neither building compromises the other. Designed for flexibility, it functions as a rental today and a multi-generational suite when the time comes.
