Global Design: A Singaporean finds soul in Canada’s South Shore cabins

NOVA SCOTIA, Canada – I knew it would be fun to go to rural Canada on a whim and stay with a stranger who built her own cabin on a farm, but I did not know I would be stepping into a quiet paradise. 

On my first night in the effortlessly chic city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, I met Bryanna. She invited me to her home, which she had built on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, a stretch of land that curves around Canada’s rugged eastern coastline.

Her cabin sits on the Spring Tides farm, run by two sisters who are her friends. The cabin is a character unto itself: beautifully raw, 378 sq ft of cosy lived-in-ness, perfect in its quirks.

I grow to know the cabin the way I would a friend – starting with its main traits, like no running water or electric heat; the outhouse a few steps away from the cabin; a friend’s painting on the wall. 

But there is also the smaller, quirkier stuff you discover only by spending time together. How the kitchen tap makes a loud, grating noise when the water tank runs low. How, when the night is quiet, you hear deer rustling through the trees behind the cabin. The grain of hemlock ceilings, drawing patterns.

This is a home lived in throughout the year, with a water tank that runs low in dry summers and a fireplace that warms the cabin in the winters.

We bathe in rivers and oceans, forage for hedgehog mushrooms in the woods out back, and make pasta with the squashes and cucumbers we pick fresh from her vegetable plot.

The two of us build a small woodshed over three days, sketching out rough blueprints, picking up 1x8-inch (2.54x20.32cm) planks from the nearby woodmill and shopping at Home Hardware for storm brackets.

A life assembled

The people I meet are not only boat builders, but also writers; full-time farmers, part-time academics; the owner of a general store, also a social worker for addiction.

There is an economy of opportunity here, where people walk many paths, using the productivity of the morning and the creativity of the evening. 

I admire it so, the ability to build a life. The sisters who own the farm are building another house on the land, and I see how they lay the bricks of their future.

Making things is an integral part of life here. The making of homes, of creative endeavours, of boats. The place draws a certain kind of folk: the mavericks, the sea-loving, the deer hunters and tree planters.

Bryanna and I also stay in an Airbnb cabin in the trees built by a couple, Peter and Paula, related to Ben, who owns the local general store. The Shack Up Tower is an impressive structure resembling a firewatch tower, rising 9m above the treeline.

One of Bryanna’s friends, Guillaume, had worked on the cabin. He points out the structural joints in the ceilings, the nearby trees they had used. From the wraparound balcony, we see the Atlantic Ocean, stretched out like a punctuation mark at the edge of everything. 

Visitors to the South Shore will find that life here is quietly designed around the water and community. 

The Salty Rose cottages are coastally charming and unaffected. The Old Confidence Lodge, a party hall in 1929, pulses with live music, all hardwood floors and Art Deco nostalgia.

You duck out of the wind and the rain into the warmth of Rose Bay Bistro to pick up coffee and local jam. And Ploughman’s Bakery – records lining shelves, hand-delivered flowers, serving up a mean porchetta – feels like the village square in one room.

In a pixel sea of curated, contrived cottagecore aesthetics, the South Shore is honest and unpretentious. Its slanting gable rooflines and cedar shake siding are silvered by Atlantic air. Its homes rise from the damp earth, shaped by salt, wind and time. It is a place built to last. 

Larry’s Third Place

But my favourite of favourites is Larry’s. Larry’s is not meant to be described, only experienced, but I can try. 

There is a small warehouse, choking with maritime paraphernalia that I spend three hours organising: oars, navigation lanterns, a billion cleats. The meat of boats, deconstructed into drawers and boxes. 

There are classic cars and old boats parked around the grounds.

There is a library-bar, a bricolage of dusty, fascinating things, that is open to everyone every Friday evening, and has been for the last hundred of these.

It is neither a party, nor a licensed bar, nor a speakeasy. It is simply Larry’s. Manned by volunteer-friends, frequented by locals and travellers. 

There is a pier on the water, and on that dock there is Larry’s little house, every corner an occasion for marvel, full of wonderful trinkets and tchotchkes.

I ask him what his favourite item in the house is and he points to an unassuming folding sink in the corner, which he says was from the boat of former US president John F. Kennedy.

And then there is Larry himself, who sounds like a rich, bizarre, old man – but who is really just a bizarre old man. Larry, tall; white hair in a low ponytail; small oval-shaped glasses; in his early 70s; nestled in a loving home with a girlfriend half his age and a funny little dog they call Baby. 

Larry, who sailed his entire house over on a barge from Halifax through a thunderstorm. Larry, the unpretentious orchestrator of this accidental haven, the setting in which I meet wonderful people who have grown to take important places in my life. 

I call it Larry’s Third Place. In urban design, a third place is a social environment that is separate from home or work, and is essential for community and civic engagement.

Usually, third places are libraries, public parks, community centres. But this is a bar-library-warehouse-home-garage where, every Friday, unlikely people come together. 

On the water at Larry’s, age demographics and tax brackets are forgotten. Sometimes, there is cake on the bar counter. Sometimes, there is a 1960s-themed dance held in the inn across the road.

Everything, somehow, fits together. The stillness of the South Shore, the industry of its people, the summer barbecues, Larry’s, the bookstore that opens up to the water, the big schooner in Lunenburg, the monstrous concoction that is a Caesar’s cocktail, the unexplainable bedroom in the art gallery that houses a dozen parakeets. 

On the edge of belonging

I knew it would be fun to go to rural Canada on a whim and stay with a woman who built her own cabin on a farm. I did not know the South Shore is a place that spins on its own axis, drawing in a cultural climate that feels so right to me.

In the past year, I had walked through mountains hollowed out by mines and driven upon salt flats that rendered the earth a great mirror. I had dirtbagged in the hiking towns of Patagonia and camped in the shadow of crumbling Incan ruins.

But it was the South Shore that made me feel like I teetered on the cusp of a great discovery, an adventure I wanted to call home.