- Project Type: Cohousing, Multi Family
- Location: Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Canada
Treehouse Village Ecohousing is the first cohousing development in Atlantic Canada – and Caddis’s first cohousing project in Canada!
Nestled within almost 15 acres of forest and a short walk along open space trails from downtown Bridgewater, the community includes 30 condominium homes and rich common spaces on a site designed to create happy community life.
A key component to this community’s success was clarity around their three priorities: to build cohousing, affordability, and to meet the Passive House standard. Beyond these three priorities were preservation of forest biodiversity, human interaction with this biodiversity, and high-quality living spaces.
The design features elegant, two-story, contemporary buildings in a forested landscape as a backdrop for day-to-day life. What you can’t see from a photograph is the life happening between the buildings in which daily life flows.
We worked hard to create opportunities for residents to interact with the landscape. The Common House is perched at the end of the community, overlooking established forest – the name Treehouse is brought to life! Extensive site analysis revealed that one end of the site was still relatively old, healthy forest and that the other end of the project had been used as a gravel pit, even though in recent years it has grown over. Accordingly, we followed the principle of repairing the site (locating new buildings on the damaged portion) as opposed to putting the buildings on the most beautiful natural area.
Caddis partnered with RHAD Architects as the local architect to conduct participatory design workshops and create a project that would foster the growing community, align with the community’s values in sustainability and egalitarianism, and aesthetically blend the local vernacular with contemporary and sustainable materials.
For more on the way Caddis has designed with nature at Treehouse Village Ecohousing and at other sites, read our blog post “Designing with Nature: Biodiverse Design in Caddis Projects.”
Image credits: RHAD Architects and TVE