Rural home with an overarching idea

Open this photo in gallery:

429697 8th Concession B Rd., Singhampton, Ont.

Asking price: $2.25-million

Taxes: $5,357.31/2024

Lot size: 4.93/Acres

Agents Sue Creed, Broker Forest Hill Real Estate Collingwood and Alycia Joy, Sales Representative

The backstory

Off a country road in the mix of horse and ski country south of Collingwood, Ont., is a 60-foot-long steel home that is a most unlikely compromise.

“I wanted to live in an old factory, and she wanted to live in the middle of the woods,” said Robert Iantorno, speaking of what he and his wife Maria Arcuri were imagining when contemplating their move about 10 years ago. They weren’t far apart on the type of structure – “She said she wanted a house to do a cartwheel in and to rollerblade in,” according to Mr. Iantorno – but finding an industrial building in a forested setting is a tall order.

As they delved into the kinds of places you might rehab into a modern home they came across a building type that stretches back to the Second World War: The Quonset Hut.

Quonsets are the larger American cousins to the British Nissen Hut (said to be inspired by an armoury from Canada of all things) which was essentially sheet metal wrapped over a simple frame. Churned out by the thousands for wartime shelter and reconstruction, Quonsets are still popular in agriculture and aviation because the curved and corrugated steel acts as its own support once it’s all bolted together.

Mr. Iantorno has a background in commercial construction and steel fabrication but he’d never built his own home before, so he hired architect Andy Thomson for the design. Still, he involved himself heavily in the construction of the main superstructure.

“My father-in-law is a master stonemason, and he said ‘Don’t do this, you’re not capable,’” Mr. Iantorno said. But on a cold, dark, January day in 2018 he began bolting together 100-pound panels of custom-extruded 14-guage steel to form the arches. Those were then lifted into place in sections with barely an eighth-of-an-inch tolerance. One day, the howling wind caught one of the spans and gave it a tug around the lift point, causing the whole structure to snap closed like a giant lobster claw. That was a bleak moment where Mr. Iantorno worried he’d bitten off a little too much.

“You have options; You can fail or you can keep going. Which one is it going to be? So, I bounced off the bottom and didn’t stop kicking,” he said. “You never think you could eventually do these things, it takes persistence, and defaulting to the expertise of other people.”

The house today

The couple gave their house the name SolarQ because the simple-looking steel shell hides a great deal of passive-house technology that keeps the home from being an energy hog.

The house sits on what Mr. Iantorno refers to as a heat battery, which stores thermal energy. Frost walls go down six feet. The in-floor heating under the polished concrete of the ground level (poured by a family friend) helps keep the interior climate warm under the sometimes brutal snows of the area. The inner shell of the home is Galvalume steel, but a thick layer of spray-foam insulation and drainage channels sits between it and the even heavier-gauge steel of the roof panels providing impressive thermal insulation.

There are no windows cut into the steel. Triple-pane window walls at either end of the structure allow plenty of natural light.

A rustic portico (with corrugated steel roof, of course) over the concrete slab forms the front entrance cut into a wall of rough-sawn white cedar. Inside is a modest rectangular hallway and foyer with sliding barn-style doors (rough-sawn white pine) under the exposed beams of the second level.

There’s a farmhouse feel as you travel down the short hall flanked by the two bedrooms on the left and right (and a full bathroom with shower), but any sense that the interior volume is basic ends as you approach the great-room that anchors the back half of the house.

Here, the ribbed Quonset interior is exposed and open, a 40-foot wide room that curves 20-feet high at the centre. “Galvalume has lots of zinc in it, there’s a satin texture to it and you can see the zinc flakes. … It creates a diffused light,” said Mr. Iantorno. A rectangle of window walls cuts almost all the way across the rear wall, providing access to the back patio.

The kitchen uses a mix of stainless steel and butcher-block counters, and the cabinets are a smooth and warm maple (Mennonite-made). Starting near the wall with the wood-stove is a glass-railed staircase climbing up to the loft level, which overhangs the kitchen just a little.

Upstairs the flooring is rough-cut six-inch white pine underneath unpainted steel, the curvature more extreme feeling now at the edges of the platform. The primary bedroom here is open and loft style, but privacy is provided by centring the sleeping area in the middle of the level. The back third of the level is an ensuite bathroom retreat and walk-in closet with narrow letterbox windows looking out over the front acreage.

Mr. Iantorno’s intention was for finishes to get more elevated and luxe as you travel from the front door through to this private retreat. “The cabinets and vanities in bathrooms are vertical grain walnut, the tiles are hand-glazed in Spain. Our mirrors are circular outlined in brass,” he said. Lighting behind the double vanity backsplash is recessed into the deep ridges of the Quonset hut’s ribs, providing a dramatic stadium-lights effect.

The perfect slice

Open this photo in gallery:

“Southern Georgian Bay has become a hot spot for luxury buyers who want more than just a home – they want an experience,” said Sue Creed, listing agent and broker with Forest Hill Real Estate Collingwood.

There are a couple Quonset hut barns and outbuildings in the area (including a second, unheated hut on the lot for Mr. Iantorno’s motorcycle/sports car workshop) but none of those interiors look like this. The couple has seen plenty of “barn-dominium” conversions of commercial or agricultural spaces where builders often try to do too much. “They double down; it has a Steampunk mancave feeling. … You don’t need barnboard everywhere,” he said.

The metaphor he relied on when weighing rustic, commercial and modern design influences comes from his Italian heritage.

“My check was a pizza Margherita: beautiful ingredients and you stop before you mess it up,” he said. Famously, this Neapolitan pizza is just fresh basil, tomatoes, olive oil and mozzarella on a simple crust.

The result, as he says, is a love letter to his wife. And as always, she’s the one pushing them to make another big change by selling it.

“It’s always Maria. She’ll see something and say, ‘Babe, we should do this.’ She said we should buy an RV and spend a winter down south, and we did,” Mr. Iantorno said.

After the Quonset hut and five acres of herbalist plantings, the couple is going even further afield looking for a lot more land, making plans for another new-build and maybe an even simpler life, too. “All I want to do – like my nonna before me – is make bread and pickles [and preserves],” he said.