Meadows House

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Meadows House by Turkel Design, 2020
Upper Pemberton Meadows, Pemberton

Photography by James Han
Story by Nadine Cuttingham

A private retreat where architecture and nature exist in harmony

Turkel Design and its Lineage

Founded by MIT graduates Joel and Meelena Turkel in 2008, Turkel Design has completed over 300 prefabricated homes across 34 US states and seven countries — each site-specific, each materially resolved, each the product of a practice that applies the precision of factory fabrication to the demands of custom design.It is a body of work that has drawn the attention of Dwell, Architectural Digest, and Architectural Record.

Their work carries a lineage stretching back to Eames' Case Study Houses and Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian concept — the same pursuit of high-quality architecture delivered through standardised building systems. Wright’s architectural hallmarks –e the central hearth as spatial anchor, cantilevered overhangs extending toward the landscape, the deliberate movement between compression and release – all find clear expression at Meadows House.

The Valley

Meadows House sits two hours north of Vancouver on the Sea-to-Sky Highway, past Squamish and past Whistler, at a point where the mountains part and the valley opens into something unexpected: a wide, quiet agrarian basin ringed on all sides by vertical peaks. Most prominent among them is Mt. Currie to the south-east, rising 2,400 metres in dramatic relief. This is the Pemberton Meadows: farmed for generations, largely unchanged.

At the back of the meadows, where the valley widens and the mountains step back, 50 acres of a former hops farm sat unremarkable from Pemberton Meadows Road. When the current custodian first walked out into the middle of the property, she was stopped by what she encountered: a vast sky, mountains on every side, and a silence unusual in the region. The property comprised three separate land titles and ten acres of forest at its rear including old growth — among them a cedar of approximately eight metres in circumference, estimated to be between 600 and 800 years old.

With the help of Turkel Design, she spent the next three years creating a home worthy of the land, a private retreat shaped by architecture, silence, and the surrounding mountains.

(Lack of) Street Appeal

Often we speak about the curb appeal of a home to describe the sensation of arrival. Meadows House escapes this framing entirely, owing to its remote positioning 750 feet from Pemberton Meadows Road. The approach is long and private, buffered by unbroken fields of green in summer and glowing snowcaps at dusk. As one drives towards the residence, the sweep of open fields, immediately halted by the verticality of the mountains, creates a sense of enclosure: an outdoor room of enormous proportion. The experience is less about arrival and more about transition – a gradual shift from the outside world into something quieter, more expansive, and entirely one’s own.

The two-storey volume clad in thermally modified ash tongue-and-groove siding imparts a deep warmth to the facade, while boldly cantilevered fir beams tie the building to the valley floor and define its roof profile, extending it into the landscape with intention. A stacked-stone chimney anchors the overall composition. As a light counterpoint, generous glazing across both floors lifts the home visually while horizontal bands of transparency frame the surrounding mountains. Meadows House is contemporary in character but feels rooted in its place.

The Interior

The front entry is deliberately understated. A hinged door with sidelites, set back beneath the second storey volume above, conceals the spatial drama deeper within.

Inside, the entry corridor establishes the terms of the house. Polished concrete floors extend through every public room on the ground floor. The walls are minimal – soft cream, the baseboard set with a deliberate shadow reveal.

The spaces within the home feel diverse in their scale and character. The entry foyer's ceiling is kept slightly lower, setting up a progression reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright and textbook Turkel: compression, then release. At the far end, where the passage gives way to the living room, the ceiling rises to ten and a half feet and the space unfolds at once. It is the moment where the house reveals itself, where structure, light, and landscape come into alignment. A band of clerestory windows transmits a light which bounces across the fir beams below, shifting through the day. The living room's full-height windows provide the first glimpse of the mountains beyond.

The ground floor is organised around three connected public rooms: kitchen, dining, and living, oriented entirely toward the landscape that surrounds them. The glazing and the weight of exposed timber together create what Turkel Design has described as an interior within nature. The dining room seats ten, its expansive glazing making the room and the landscape continuous when the doors are open. A minimalist fireplace set within a white wall organises the living room, while a pair of lift-and-slide doors opens the space entirely to the south-east facing timber deck beyond, dissolving the boundary between inside and out.

The kitchen is a cook's workspace: flat-panel white oak cabinetry, a large island in Vancouver Island marble, a professional range, and above the sink, a long horizontal picture window that frames the meadow and tree line like a painting. The marble, sourced from a single island quarry, is installed in generous, unbroken runs.

The interior detailing rewards further attention. Full-height timber-framed windows open views to the outside. Custom white oak millwork pervades the interior. Recessed motorised blinds disappear into crisp ceiling planes when raised. Silent radiant heating warms the floor underfoot. Further refinements reduce auditory and visual noise: no visible technology, no screens, no LEDs, no hum — leaving only the house and the landscape around it. On clear nights, the Milky Way and often the northern lights are visible above the meadows.

Above

The upper floor is reached via a staircase centred in the plan, where a cluster of Bocci pendant lights falls from the ceiling in varying lengths, their warm glow the first sign that the register of the house has shifted. The landing opens to a loft: a quiet counterpart to the living room below.

Two bedrooms anchor the upper floor, each oriented toward the meadow and the mountains, with Mt. Currie framed in one direction and the back of the valley in another. The primary ensuite continues the material language of the house in Vancouver Island marble — walls, floor, and shower — with a freestanding soaking tub set directly against the picture window. Even the most private room in the house looks outward.

CALL TO THE NEXT CUSTODIAN

At the back of the Pemberton Meadows, where the valley opens and the noise falls away, this is a house that has settled fully into its surroundings — designed by Turkel Design and refined by an owner deeply connected to this valley. Its next custodian will inherit not only a home of material and spatial quality, but an irreplaceable retreatwhere architecture, land, silence, an wilderness exist in quiet balance.

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Home Facts

Name: Meadows House
Address: 9209 Pemberton Meadows Rd, Pemberton
Neighbourhood: Upper Pemberton Meadows
Designer: Turkel Design
Price: $4,450,000
Year Completed: 2020
Interior Living: Two-level post-and-beam retreat in fir, oak, and Vancouver Island marble, with floor-to-ceiling glazing on every elevation and a downstairs living-dining-kitchen volume oriented to 360-degree views of Mt. Currie and the upper Pemberton Meadows — engineered around silence, natural light, and the dissolution of the indoor-outdoor threshold.
Site Area: 50 acres
Levels: 2
Bedrooms: 3
Bathrooms: 3
Interior Living: 2,645 sqft
Exterior Living: 799 sqft

Structural / Engineering Highlights:
- House set back 750+ ft from Pemberton Meadows Rd (current SLRD bylaws cap new builds at ~80 ft from road — non-replicable)
- Buried BC Hydro service to the house (400 amp, vs. standard 200 amp; lines buried rather than pole-run)
- Silent in-floor radiant heating
- Heat pump forced air + AC (concealed)
- Silent motorized Lutron blinds throughout
- Embedded whole-home audio system with in-wall subwoofers (interior + deck/yard)
- Three legal lots — 30 acres in the valley, 10 acres of forest, and 10 acres of hillside - flexibility for additional structures the surrounding SLRD rules would otherwise restrict

Landscape and Planning:
- 10 acres of forest at rear with remaining old-growth, including a cedar ~8 m in circumference (estimated 600–800 years old); bucolic farmland setting; resident wildlife (grizzly with cubs, wolves, moose, coyotes, deer, bobcat)

Key Materials:
- Fir beams and clean eye-less fir ceiling throughout
- Concrete floors on the ground level
- Custom white oak kitchen cabinetry and white oak interior doors
- Natural marble (kitchen, mudroom, bathrooms) sourced from Vancouver Island
- Thermally modified ash exterior cladding and decking (improved heat/fire resistance)

Views / Orientation:
- 360° mountain views including commanding outlook to Mt. Currie; oriented to capture first light in the morning and golden-hour sun setting down the back of the valley in summer; positioned at a wider section of the valley for a sense of openness

Features:
- Floor-to-ceiling windows (extended well beyond Turkel's original spec)
- Bocci pendant lights in stairwell
- Large wood-burning fireplace
- Chef's kitchen — Wolf double oven, Fisher & Paykel fridge
- Marvin windows and exterior doors
- Volvo EV charging station
- Large Jacuzzi hot tub (6–8 person)
- Outdoor cedar Sauna (6 person)
- Nest thermostats (only visible "tech" — by design, all other systems concealed)
- Sensory-considered design: no visible LEDs, no exposed screens/panels, dimmable lighting throughout

Download Floorplan