Braden Stanley/Braden Stanley/Stanley Media Group
100 Red Sky Place, Kelowna, B.C.
Asking price: $3,364,900
Taxes: $10,721 (2023)
Lot size: 0.32 acre
Listing agent: Richard Deacon, Engel & Volkers Okanagan
From the second floor balcony of 100 Red Sky Place in Kelowna you can look left, and look right and see almost the entire 120 kilometre stretch of Lake Okanagan, from Vernon to Penticton.
It was this vista of the long, narrow lake in central British Columbia that compelled owners Gary Mackay and Jisun Park to buy land and work with local builder Rykon to design their custom dream home in 2018.
“We fell in love with the views,” said Mr. Mackay. “We were in Calgary and Kelowna was a fun place to go. We loved the wineries; that was kind of one of the big attractions.”
Mr. Mackay had retired from a career with British Petroleum and pushed hard to make the house as energy efficient as possible. His wife was a fashion designer who wanted to put a stamp on the interiors and the finishes.
“We have a lot of eclectic collections – antiques from London, antiques from India – and we wanted to show all these nice pieces,” Ms. Park said. Finding a palette that worked to connect all these differing materials into a cohesive whole was her job, while Mr. Mackay stressed about maintaining the views they saw when they bought the site as a raw piece of land.
“It certainly wasn’t a happy accident,” he said. “Every thought in the design was where to put the windows and we maximized the windows on the view line, and reduced them elsewhere.”
The result is a space that’s contemporary and even a little industrial, that serves as a backdrop for the lake and the mountains beyond, and as a showcase for their globe-trotting cultural artifacts.
The house today
Home of the Week, 100 Red Sky Place, Kelowna, B.C.Braden Stanley/Braden Stanley/Stanley Media Group
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From the street, there are a few features that distinguish it from neighbouring custom homes. There’s a lot more brick than the average Kelowna house (the orange bricks are a reminder of Mr. Mackay’s English homeland) and the overhangs above the windows are a little deeper and provide a bit more shade than most.
“We’re close to net zero,” in terms of carbon footprint said Mr. Mackay. Annual energy costs are barely $2,000 a year, he said. “All we need to do is put in solar panels.”
Most of the energy savings are achieved through insulation above and below grade, as well as from high efficiency windows and a heat pump for most of the heating and cooling. That said, there is a gas fireplace, gas range and even a gas furnace as a backup for those rare Kelowna under-15 degree days.
Inside the front door your eye is drawn past the stairs and living room straight outdoors to a covered patio on the lakeside of the house with a large accordion-like wall of windows that opens to the mountain view beyond. The whole rear property is one big pool deck and outdoor living space.
The living room is a two-storey atrium anchored by a second set of windows on the upper half of the rear wall and flanked by a large chimney clad in locally made concrete panels. These are also used on the front porch and rear patio in smaller quantities.
Tucked around to the right is the rest of the main living space, with the kitchen and dining room. Mrs. Park always wanted walnut cabinets, and while the walls in the house are almost uniformly white (as are the upper cabinets here) the rich warm walnut cladding on the lower cabinets bridges the paler engineered oak floor with the darker black granite of the central island. On the rear wall is a mix of lower cabinet storage and upper full windows that extend to a secondary bedroom suite (designed for aging in place) with more lake views.
In the corner of the kitchen is access to a large mud room and pantry (with more walnut and more industrial-style tiles) and the three-car garage. The garage could fit as many as five cars with a stacker system, according to listing agent Richard Deacon, but the feature Ms. Park insisted on is the tiled waist-height dog-wash station near Mr. Mackay’s squared away garage workshop. The couple doesn’t have a dog, but Ms. Park was planning ahead for the day she convinced her husband to get one.
The second level is dedicated to the primary bedroom suite with a deck giving stunning lake vistas through a floor-to-ceiling glass wall. The ensuite bathroom has a soaker tub under a window and two separate vanities flanking the opening to the walk-in closet. A door in the closet also connects to the second-floor laundry room, which reconnects back to the irregular hallway/landing that opens to the main living space atrium.
The basement (with deep window wells pulling in light) is the entertainment focus with a red-felt billiards table next to Mr. Mackay’s music collection, a TV and media area and wine storage. There’s a glassed-in gym area next to the stairs. Behind a sliding barn door is a hallway to a nanny suite with its own bathroom, and the storage/mechanical room next to exterior access stairs.
Forever home
The house has a roughed-in elevator shaft. That space is now used as closets, but was built to support a future elevator retrofit. Mr. Deacon said there’s a local company that could do the job for less than $50,000.
“The thought of aging in place, it’s becoming a big thing, and we designed the house with that in mind,” said Mr. Mackay.