Loft Crémazie

Québec City, Canada

The loft is located in a central neighborhood of Quebec City, near one of the city's most interesting shopping streets. The architectural intervention transforms a disused mechanic’s workshop located in a courtyard into a loft.

The main challenge of this project was to arrange stimulating living spaces in the basement. The need to dig outdoor spaces in continuity with the places to stay quickly proved to be the good strategy.  Three courtyards with different configurations and sizes were created at basement level. The largest one is located towards the entrance side. During the summer, this place becomes an extension of the interior living spaces. Thanks to a two-story center, this "outdoor room" marks its presence towards the entrance volume which forms the pivot of the new distribution of internal spaces.

At ground floor level, the interventions have been more minimal and have strived to put in relation some elements from the building itself but also from the site and the district. The wide openings of the facade on the street side, one of which had been condemned by the previous owner, have been updated: one has become the interior passage between the new entrance volume and the loft, while the other one has been filed by a glazed garage door. Right in front of this opening on the opposite side of the loft, an “inverted” bay window allows the southern light to come in and creates a fault in the loft which puts the routes of the boulevard René-Levesque and of the Chemin Sainte-Foy into a visual relation. 

With A. Vallières

Photography by F. Michaud