It’s not just the nature in Canada that’s so amazing it doesn’t seem possible. The buildings boggle the mind, too.
HAVE A BALL
Free Spirit Spheres on Vancouver Island are unique, circular treehouses that give visitors a chance to sleep suspended in the forest canopy as if in a nest. Rented by the night, these globular units look like giant nuts or seeds hanging from the trees. Inside, they feature two porthole windows to give a bird’s eye view of Mother Nature. With inside diameters of about 3.2 meters (around 10 feet), each orb squeezes in fold-out tables and mirrors, curved loft beds and benches, and tiny appliances.
To enter a sphere at the “treesort” in Qualicum Beach, you climb up a spiral staircase that wraps around the trunk and then cross a short suspension bridge to get in the front door. Made from light, bendy woods like Sitka Spruce and Yellow Cedar, they weigh about 500 kilograms (1,102 pounds). The builders borrowed heavily from techniques used for sailboat construction. The spheres are tethered to three separate trees in a manner mimicking a spider web, so the affect of the wind’s movement is minimized. They sway gently in the breeze but move much more abruptly when someone inside changes position.
Tom Chudleigh, the inventor and manufacturer of these tree-mounted spheres, says that being in the sphere is “like being in a nut shell that’s decorated like a palace. It feels like you are floating in the canopy among the sleeping birds. When it’s stormy it can be tense, but nothing like a storm at sea.” The spheres are for sale as well—a wood unit (wired, insulated, heated, and plumbed) goes for about $150,000, and a fiberglass unit (insulated and wired) for about $45,000.
LIVING INSIDE MARILYN MONROE?
Southwest of Toronto, in Mississauga, Ontario, a condominium complex is breaking out of the cereal-box mold of skyscrapers. The residential Absolute Tower 1 has been dubbed “Marilyn Monroe” by the locals because the building is extra curvy. The voluptuous skyscraper rises up 56 stories, and it has a shorter, less buxom twin that is 50 stories tall. Ma Yansong, who designed the building when he was just 30, said he was trying to “express nature in the big cities.” The floors of the Absolute Tower are increasingly oval, which maintains the curved and twisted outline. One continuous spiraling balcony adds to the condo’s curviness. A three-story recreation and exercise facility, which is both indoor and outdoor, features areas for basketball, baseball, and volleyball. Residents enjoy a heated outdoor pool complete with patio and fireplace. In 2012, when these modern towers were completed, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat awarded the towers the prize of Best Tall Buildings in the Americas.
PYRAMID-POWERED WINE
In Kelowna, British Columbia, a great pyramid of wine rises. Overlooking Kelowna’s Okanagan Lake, the Summerhill Winery has a very unique feature—a huge four-story pyramid where wines are aged. When Stephen Cipes first visited the Okanagan in 1986, the New Yorker thought that area would be ideal for producing intensely flavored small grapes. In 1991, he established his 45-acre, all-organic winery, using no pesticides or herbicides. Wines are aged for 30 to 90 days in the concrete replica of the Pyramid of Cheops. Cipes believes that the sacred geometry of the pyramid clarifies and enhances liquids. The winery, which is the most visited in Canada, produces Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Gewurztraminer, Ehrenfelser, and Pinot Meunier. In addition to the pyramid, the winery uses some other very unique techniques to create its award-winning organic vino. The vineyard takes rainwater mixed with the manure from a lactating cow to produce a biologically-active fertilizer which is then sprayed on the vines. The mixture is supposed to suppress fungus and mildew.
WHY DOES THIS PLACE MAKE ME THIRSTY?
Edouard Arsenault, the lighthouse keeper at Cap-Egmont in Prince Edward Island, sure liked bottles. He accumulated a massive collection, and at age 66 he decided it was time to start building houses out of them. Between 1980 and 1984, he cemented together 25,000 bottles to build three fantasy houses. The structures include a six-gabled house and a chapel. In the 1990s, the buildings were deteriorating and had to be rebuilt using more stable foundations.
Vancouver visitor to child: “Does it ever stop raining here?” Child: “How should I know? I’m only six.”