There is a moment on the drive into Muskoka when Ontario begins to change.
The highway narrows.
Pines crowd closer.
Granite appears beside the road.
And every so often, through the trees, there is a flash of blue that tells you the lake isn’t far away.
Eventually, the pavement gives way to a smaller road.
Then gravel.
Then, tucked among the trees, the cottage appears.
Except calling this place a cottage requires a fairly generous interpretation of the word.
Cedar, timber, granite and enormous panes of glass stretch along the rocky shoreline. The architecture is substantial without fighting the landscape. Mature pines rise around it. Somewhere beyond the house is a boathouse, although from here you can barely see it.
A dog comes down the steps to investigate the arriving car.
Not frantically.
This isn’t his first summer here.
He knows eventually someone will open the trunk and something interesting will come out.
Welcome to the lake.
Built Around the View
Inside, almost everything leads your eye back outside.
The great room rises beneath heavy timber beams, with enormous windows looking through the pines toward the water.
At one end, a massive fireplace is built from rugged granite that looks as though it could have been gathered from the shoreline.
The furniture is equally substantial.
Deep upholstered seating. Beautiful solid-wood tables. Handmade pieces chosen because they’ll look better after twenty years than they did the day they arrived.
This isn’t a room filled with things simply because they’re expensive.
It’s a room filled with things worth keeping.
Above the fireplace hangs a serious Canadian landscape rather than a television. Elsewhere, contemporary artwork, carving and sculpture add another layer to the room.
Among them is a small sculptural table involving the form of a dog.
It isn’t cute.
It doesn’t have paw prints.
Nobody bought it in the pet aisle.
It’s simply a beautiful piece of functional art that happens to involve an animal this family loves.
The actual dog is asleep nearby.
He’s considerably less interested in design.
Where Everyone Eventually Ends Up
The kitchen is large because it has to be.
Not because twelve people live here every day, but because twelve people have a remarkable habit of appearing around six o’clock on a Saturday.
Adult children arrive.
Friends come by boat.
Grandchildren materialize looking for snacks.
Someone opens wine.
Someone else starts corn.
A person who wasn’t invited to help begins offering opinions about the barbecue.
And somehow there are now three dogs in the kitchen.
The cabinetry is beautiful. Stone counters provide acres of working space. Big windows keep the lake visible while dinner is being prepared.
But nothing feels precious.
There is a wet glass sitting on the island.
A dish towel has been abandoned beside the sink.
Someone’s sunglasses are next to a bowl of Ontario peaches.
One dog has positioned himself precisely where everyone needs to walk.
Nobody designed a special dog feature into this room.
They didn’t need to.
Sometimes making a home pet-friendly simply means creating a beautiful room where everyone is allowed to live.
The Table That Has Seen Everything
Beyond the kitchen sits one of the most important pieces of furniture in the cottage.
A spectacular Canadian-made solid-wood dining table.
It is enormous.
It needs to be.
On a summer evening, every chair may be occupied.
Grandparents at one end.
Children at the other.
Friends squeezed in wherever another chair can fit.
Dogs underneath, operating an informal cleanup service.
The table isn’t flawless anymore.
There are scratches.
A faint mark where something hot was once put down without a trivet.
One corner has a small dent nobody remembers making.
Perfect.
Because a table like this shouldn’t remain perfect.
Over the years it will host birthdays, Thanksgiving dinners, fish caught that afternoon, rainy-day card games, arguments, engagements, homework, Christmas dinners and countless ordinary Tuesday breakfasts.
Children will grow taller beside it.
Dogs will grow older underneath it.
Someday the table may belong to one of those children.
The scratches will go with it.
That’s the difference between buying furniture and keeping furniture.
The Room That Earns Its Keep
Muskoka is beautiful.
Muskoka is also wet.
Dogs come out of the lake.
Children come out of the lake.
Adults who should know better come out of the lake.
Then everybody attempts to enter the house simultaneously.
Which explains the mudroom.
Slate floors run beneath beautifully made cabinetry. There are deep drawers, open cubbies, hooks, benches and enough storage to absorb an impressive collection of life jackets, raincoats, towels, boots and things nobody can identify but apparently cannot throw away.
Then there is the dog wash.
Not a plastic tub awkwardly inserted into the corner.
A proper tiled washing station integrated into the architecture, with a handheld shower, stone ledge and storage for towels.
Nearby, two sleeping spaces are built directly into the cabinetry.
They look less like kennels than small pieces of millwork.
One is currently occupied.
The other dog has ignored his completely and fallen asleep in the middle of the floor.
Naturally.
Apparently the Dog Needed a Cottage Too
There are reasonable accommodations for pets.
And then there is this.
Somewhere during the design process, somebody apparently looked around their spectacular Muskoka home and concluded that the dog required his own architecture.
So built into a quiet corner of the house is what can only be described as a miniature Muskoka cottage.
Real timber.
Cedar.
A tiny stone base.
A pitched roof.
Architectural lighting.
A small sleeping area inside.
There is no bone-shaped window.
There is no sign reading DOG HOUSE.
Thank goodness.
Instead, the architect has treated the entire ridiculous proposition with complete seriousness.
Which somehow makes it wonderful.
The dog appears to regard it as perfectly reasonable.
Of course he does.
Not Everything Is About the Dog
Walk farther through the cottage and something else becomes apparent.
These people like art.
Not dog signs.
Not inspirational sayings painted onto boards.
Art.
A large contemporary Canadian work occupies one wall.
A carved piece sits quietly on a console.
Landscape photography appears farther down the hallway.
There are paintings that seem to have been collected slowly rather than ordered together because somebody decided the room needed “blue.”
Some pieces are valuable.
Others probably aren’t.
That’s not really the point.
The house feels collected.
And importantly, not every object refers back to the dog.
A pet-friendly home doesn’t have to announce itself every six feet.
Sometimes the most sophisticated decision is knowing when to stop.
The Office With the Other Pets
The office may be the quietest room in the house.
A desk faces the trees rather than the wall.
Built-in cabinetry holds books, papers and the usual evidence that somebody occasionally attempts to work while everyone else is outside.
Then one entire section of the cabinetry becomes something unexpected.
An aquarium.
Not a little glass box sitting on a desk.
A large, beautifully integrated aquarium treated almost like living artwork.
Fish move silently through plants, rock and filtered light.
There isn’t a dog in the room.
There doesn’t need to be.
A house shared with animals can contain many different relationships with them.
And occasionally it’s nice to live with a pet that doesn’t come inside covered in lake water.
The Walls Remember
The most revealing artwork in the cottage isn’t particularly valuable.
It hangs along a hallway leading toward the bedrooms.
Family photographs.
Lots of them.
Some are beautifully framed professional images.
Others are objectively terrible photographs.
Nobody cares.
There is a faded picture of two children standing beside an old wooden boat.
Their father appears in another photograph holding a fish considerably closer to the camera than necessary.
There are grandparents.
Birthdays.
Winter weekends.
Kids jumping from the dock.
Someone waterskiing badly.
Someone else waterskiing surprisingly well.
And dogs.
The Labrador who spent fifteen summers here.
The terrier who hated the boat.
The enormous mutt who apparently believed every floating object required rescue.
The dog currently sleeping in the great room appears as a puppy, standing on the same dock several years earlier.
There are people in these photographs who no longer come to the cottage.
There are dogs who can’t.
That’s why the photographs stay.
Beautiful houses tell you something about the people who built them.
Photographs tell you about the people who lived there.
The Screened Porch
Eventually, everyone discovers the screened porch.
Morning coffee happens here.
So does afternoon reading.
And evening drinks.
Deep chairs and sofas sit beneath a warm wood ceiling while screens turn the lake and forest into enormous living pictures.
There are no televisions.
There doesn’t appear to be any particular reason for one.
Beyond the screens, a pair of Muskoka chairs sits on the granite.
A dog is asleep beside one of the sofas.
A book lies open and face-down on a table despite generations of librarians insisting this should never happen.
Nobody seems especially concerned about the time.
That’s one of the luxuries of the place.
Not having to be anywhere else.
The Cottage Outside the Cottage
Follow a path around the side of the house and there is another piece of architecture tucked among the pines.
At first glance it might be a tiny garden pavilion.
Then you notice the scale.
The dog has an outdoor cottage.
Of course he does.
But like its indoor counterpart, this isn’t novelty architecture.
A small granite foundation anchors cedar walls. Timber supports hold a proper roof over a tiny covered porch. The proportions echo the main house without turning it into a miniature cartoon.
Beside the porch sits a single Muskoka chair.
It may be the smallest Muskoka chair ever made.
At this point nobody is pretending the family hasn’t gone too far.
They have.
It’s magnificent.
Down to the Lake
The path toward the water follows the granite rather than fighting it.
Steps appear where they’re needed.
Pines grow through openings in the landscape.
Ornamental grasses soften the edges.
Then the trees begin opening.
You see the boathouse first.
Beyond it, the lake.
Children are already halfway down the path carrying towels and life jackets.
One adult follows with considerably more equipment than should be necessary for an afternoon.
The dog races past everyone.
Apparently he has an appointment.
The Boathouse
If the main cottage belongs to the family, the boathouse belongs to summer.
Weathered timber meets beautifully maintained woodwork.
Paddles hang along one wall.
A canoe rests nearby.
There are ropes, life jackets and enough accumulated boating equipment to suggest nobody has thrown anything away since approximately 1994.
And sitting in the slip is something special.
A classic wooden runabout.
Mahogany gleams against blue water.
Chrome catches the afternoon sun.
The boat is beautiful enough to be sculpture and impractical enough to be loved.
The dog stands on the dock watching preparations with intense concentration.
He has learned something important over the years.
When the cooler comes down the hill, the boat is probably going somewhere.
Everyone Has a Favourite Chair
Scattered around the property are pieces of furniture so associated with Canadian lake life that removing them would feel wrong.
Muskoka chairs.
On the porch.
Beside the fire.
On the granite.
At the dock.
Some are beautifully finished.
Others have faded after years in the sun.
Nobody calls them statement pieces.
Nobody carefully stages them.
They’re simply where people sit.
Morning coffee.
Afternoon beer.
Children wrapped in towels.
Grandparents watching the lake.
Someone reading the same three pages of a book before falling asleep.
A dog lying underneath because the granite is cooler there.
There are more sophisticated pieces of furniture in this house.
Few are more important.
When Everyone Comes Back Up
Late afternoon brings everybody back toward the cottage.
Wet towels appear over railings.
Shoes accumulate near doors.
Someone has lost a hat.
Nobody knows where one of the children is until somebody points toward the dock.
The dogs are exhausted.
This is considered a major achievement.
Dinner begins without anyone formally announcing that dinner has begun.
The big table fills again.
Doors remain open.
The lake turns silver through the windows.
Someone tells a story everybody has heard before.
They tell it anyway.
After Dinner
Eventually, the plates disappear.
A fire is lit outside.
Children toast marshmallows with wildly different interpretations of what constitutes “done.”
Adults settle into chairs.
Someone brings another bottle from the house.
The dogs move between people before collapsing near the fire.
The conversation becomes slower.
The lake becomes quieter.
Across the water, lights begin appearing at other cottages.
This is when the expensive architecture starts disappearing.
Nobody is discussing the granite.
Nobody is admiring the cabinetry.
Nobody is asking who made the sofa.
The house has done its job.
It has created a place for everything else to happen.
The End of the Dock
Before darkness completely settles over the lake, three figures remain at the end of the dock.
A boy.
A dog.
A girl.
They sit with their backs toward the cottage, looking across the water as the last colour disappears behind the trees.
Nobody appears to be saying much.
They don’t need to.
The granite beneath this cottage will outlive all of them.
The table will collect more scratches.
The wooden boat will require another coat of varnish.
Another generation of photographs will eventually join the ones in the hallway.
The children sitting on this dock will grow up.
One summer they’ll stop being children.
Years later, perhaps they’ll return with children of their own.
There will probably be another dog sleeping beside the fireplace by then.
They may not remember who made every chair.
They won’t remember what the kitchen cost.
But they’ll remember jumping from the dock.
They’ll remember wet towels.
Boat rides.
Rain against the screened porch.
Dinners that lasted too long.
Grandparents.
Brothers and sisters.
Friends who came for the weekend and stayed until Tuesday.
And they’ll remember the dogs.
Because the furniture, art, architecture and craftsmanship are what make you want the cottage.
But that’s never really why people keep coming back to the lake.
The cottage is beautiful.
The life built around it is the part worth keeping.
From Muskoka to the West Coast
If you love beautiful homes designed with pets in mind, head west. A Cat Lover’s West Coast Home explores a spectacular coastal home where architecture, art, nature and thoughtful design come together for the people—and cats—who live there.
