Humminghill Farm

The Perfect Hideaway
West Bolton, 2018
The Perfect Hideaway — West Bolton, 2018

A place with a purpose

First transformed by an American tobacco heiress in the 1960s, this sprawling estate in Quebec’s Eastern Townships encompasses a 6,000-square-foot main house, a 2,000-square-foot coach house, stables, outbuildings, a tennis court and a pool house. By buying this property, Richard and Maxime, co-owners of Les Ensembliers, went from living a high-flying, high-pressure lifestyle... to flower farming.

The 32-acre property is a working farm featuring a massive vegetable plot, honeybees, chickens, and a sugar bush that will produce gallons of maple syrup each spring. Since buying the property in 2016, the couple has been hard at work digging, building and planting, all in preparation of opening their very own flower farm. Their plan is to renovate the main house, and turn the coach house into an atelier and farm production facility—quite the undertaking!

Their concept revolved around building a contemporary and minimalist shingle-style A-frame house, their intention being to create a simplified 'wood box' that would connect to a large vegetable garden. In the future, once they have moved into the main house and vacated the coach, they will make it into their working studio. Made of blond wood to add warmth to the concrete floors and bare windows, the space is done up very simply to leave the wow factor to the nature outside.

The coach house is the perfect hideaway for a hardworking couple who dream of living a simpler life in the country.

    “When we first drove up the alley of trees, I knew we were home.”
    —Richard Ouellette
    “The coach house architecture is an abstraction of a shingled farm building with no details and gutters all hidden away.”
    —Maxime Vandal
    “When we first drove up the alley of trees, I knew we were home.”
    —Richard Ouellette
    “The coach house architecture is an abstraction of a shingled farm building with no details and gutters all hidden away.”
    —Maxime Vandal