Shim fit: Rundles restaurant and tower house in a riverside setting in Stratford, Ontario.

Life in Stratford, Ontario revolves around a summer Shakespeare festival that was started by Tyrone Guthrie in the early 1950s and has become a driving force of the local economy. In this setting, Rundles, a restaurant housed in a former boathouse overlooking the river, has prospered and grown incrementally over the last thirty years under the watchful eye of the same proprietor.

The most recent addition, designed by Shim-Sutcliffe for an adjacent site that was formerly a small parking area, provides both a new entrance to the restaurant and a residence. The boundary between living and working is marked by a 20ft (6m) high site-cast concrete wall that slices obliquely between the orthogonal volumes of the two buildings. The angle of the wall gives the restaurant more street frontage, provides space for a reconfigured entrance and additional indoor and outdoor seating areas.

Passing a small garden, patrons enter into a toplit space with a ramp up between the concrete boundary wall and a new low wall to the expanded dining area. Within this slot, guests can also continue up to a smaller rear dining room, which looks out to an existing garden at the side. In contrast with restaurant entrance, the tapered sliver of space created against the other side of the concrete wall defines the rear entrance to the house, which is smaller in scale and mysteriously illuminated by isolated shafts of daylight. This entrance makes it possible for the proprietor to move discreetly from the restaurant into the rear garden and down into the sunken double-height kitchen of the dwelling.

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This lowest level of the house is cut into the sloping site and is formed by highly articulated site-cast concrete that creates the long outer face of the house, a ramped parking space on the street, and a water garden outside the kitchen. The more private areas of the dwelling are held in a tall, slender volume perched on this concrete ground, entered by a wooden ramp. The foyer is the base of a double-height toplit void, which captures the sky at the heart of the house. Vertical circulation moves theatrically around and through this void, connecting floors on alternating split levels at the front and rear of the house. Rooms facing the street are generous in section and open into the central void, while those looking over the rear garden are more intimate in scale and shielded from view by screens of immaculately detailed fir studs and shiplap cladding. A backlit translucent glazed aperture in this wooden skin momentarily reveals the silhouette of the stair and the occupants of the house, who are subsequently seen on the bridge across the void leading to the master bedroom or on the landing that projects into the kitchen. Although there are no doors, each room has a clear threshold marked by a change of floor finish from the wooden stair to carpet, stone or concrete. Moving through the house, unfolding views alternate between pastoral river scenes generously framed by windows that slice open the front corners of the house and close-up oblique views of the informal backs of adjacent buildings.

While at first glance the construction of the new concrete wall seems to define an impenetrable boundary, the relationship that it creates between restaurant and dwelling is both complex and malleable. Just as the restaurant has a seasonal life, closing from October through May to become a cooking school, so the house kitchen can be private or utilized for demonstrations for the cooking school. Likewise, the proprietor can live in a former flat above the restaurant kitchen, enabling the residence to become a guesthouse during the theatre season. This shifting boundary between public and private does not merely provide flexibility, but underlines a rich and ambiguous relationship between life and work, giving new meaning to the concept of living above the shop.

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B. C./A. W. L.