alexandre bernier architecte designs concrete residence within a garden in montreal

A home hidden in St-Henri, Montreal

Alexandre Bernier Architecte’s Maison-Jardin BEAU hides within Montreal’s St-Henri neighborhood with an understated confidence. Here, in a district shaped by industrial history and tight urban fabric, the house maintains a quiet autonomy. Its slender vertical form, shaped by concrete, engages gently with the street, while turning its focus inward toward a garden.

The architect approaches the project as a radical interpretation of the traditional Montreal duplex. Constructed almost entirely from concrete, from structural core to floor surfaces, the house proposes a bold redefinition of domestic architecture. In a city where residential buildings are often timber-framed, this mono-material choice sets the project apart, both in presence and performance.

images © Maxime Brouillet

Maison-Jardin beau Opens onto a Garden

With its Maison-Jardin BEAU, Alexandre Bernier Architecte reveals a subtle duality. The design team pairs concrete’s density with a transparent garden-facing elevation, allowing the home to breathe within its envelope. Its structural core supports open, stacked floor plates, freeing the facades to invite light into every corner. Against the solidity of its mineral surfaces, shadows from surrounding foliage animate the interiors with a gentle rhythm.

On the ground floor, the boundary between home and garden dissolves. Alexandre Bernier designs the residence with a sliding glass wall that retracts entirely, allowing daily life to spill into the landscape. A shallow reflecting pool stretches across the threshold, gathering sky and sunlight, offering a quiet contrast to the house’s heft and grounding its mass in an element of weightless movement.

Maison-Jardin BEAU is located in Montreal’s St-Henri neighborhood

alexandre bernier responds to urban living

Alexandre Bernier Architecte curates the interiors of its Maison-Jardin BEAU with expressive concrete, a raw material palette which reveals a surprising softness. The team selects distinct finishes — scarified terrazzo floors glint with exposed aggregate while the formwork’s traces remain visible on the walls. These surfaces, though heavy in material, become tactile and expressive. A fourteen-foot kitchen island, sculpted with rounded edges, serves as both anchor and gathering place, cast in the same concrete language as the rest.

The architecture does not rely on concrete just for its design aesthetic. Alexandre Bernier taps into its thermal properties to regulate interior comfort. The mass stores heat in winter and moderates temperature in summer, assisted by a radiant floor system that runs through the home. The structure’s integrity allows for larger window openings, which are strategically oriented to optimize daylight and seasonal solar gain.

The home is a new response to urban living. Rather than expanding outward, the compressed volume opens vertically and allows the garden to flourish around it. This way, the space feels private and intimate, yet it opens widely onto its surroundings. In this balance of contrasts, the house cultivates a way of living that feels both resilient and open to change.

Alexandre Bernier designs the vertical single-family home to be constructed almost entirely of concrete