The Globe and Mail

Holidaying on Lake Muskoka is, or was, a staid and often stately affair. Some houses there are very grand. But the most successful Muskoka cottages, of whatever size and vintage, have always partaken of local building traditions that go back to the late Victorian origins of cottaging on the lake. I am thinking here of modest timber cabins put up in the early days by small-town Ontario ministers, doctors and teachers, often along lines suggested by British small-house originals; and of charming places that nestle back into the region's forests and rocks. Now for a Lake Muskoka cottage that is very different from all that.