JAPAVARIAN BLADES
2020 | VANCOUVER, BC | COMPLETE
Japavarian Blades is a Vancouver laneway home developed as prior professional work by David Longpre while employed at Smallworks. David’s role included exterior design, interior design, and project design development, shaping the home as a compact retreat that brings together architecture, landscape, and the personal story of the client.
The project was designed for a client who is a pilot, which gave the home a unique conceptual starting point. From above, the roof forms read almost like two wings set into the garden, creating a rare moment where the client could experience the house in a way architects often do, as a composition in plan, form, and landscape. That aerial reading became part of the project’s character: a small home with a strong sense of flight, shelter, and orientation.
Set within Vancouver’s west side, the house is nestled into a lush client designed pollinator garden. The garden is not treated as decoration around the building, but as part of the architecture itself. Planting, patios, windows, overhangs, and dark exterior cladding work together to create a quiet refuge where the home feels held by the landscape.
The design language brings together dark grounded volumes, warm wood soffits, sharp roof lines, textured cladding, and generous glazing. Its compact form carries a calm intensity, with the roof lifting and folding like wings above the garden. Inside, the home continues this balance of clarity and warmth through high ceilings, natural light, simple materials, and open living spaces connected to planting and sky.
Japavarian Blades is one of the earliest projects in the genesis of David Longpre’s Japavarian design language for Vancouver. The house helped clarify a direction that would later become central to Longpre Architecture: a way of designing homes that brings together Japanese spatial restraint, Bavarian warmth, Scandinavian clarity, and the particular landscape culture of the West Coast.
For David Longpre, the project remains an important example of how even a small house can carry a larger emotional and symbolic world. It is a home about flight and grounding, precision and softness, structure and garden, a vessel for daily life set quietly into the landscape of Vancouver.
Project note: Prior professional work by David Longpre, completed while employed at Smallworks. David’s role included exterior design, interior design, and project design development. Architectural firm and builder, Smallworks.
