There were folks who thought Pamela Plumb had taken leave of her senses after she bought an 1830 house in Pointe Claire village nine years ago with a plan to resuscitate it. The place was decrepit, barely fit for human habitation.

But Plumb, an architect, saw beyond the hole in the living room floor that revealed the earth beneath, the sagging beams, the tiny bathroom tucked under a stairwell and the layers of wallpaper dating back more than a century. And in time, she not only renovated the building to be used as her professional office, she also designed a show-stopping contemporary home, which she annexed to the back of the historic structure to create a blissful marriage of old and new.

She inhabits the space, which overlooks a wide expanse of Lake St. Louis, with her husband, Raj Dhindsa, and her mother, Katharine Ivey.

The whole project is actually an act of love - love of family and of the natural environment. Plumb, a native of Seattle, wanted her elderly mother to come to Canada to live with her. "My mother was living on Vashon Island, off Seattle, in a converted fire hall and she wanted the village life and to be close to the water," Plumb said.

"That combination was hard to find here. But then we saw this old house in Pointe Claire village. When I went to view it, it was in such bad shape that the real estate agent didn't want to come in."

The tiny seignieurial-style house, which nestles up against the sidewalk of one of the village's narrow side streets, was beside another house, built in the 1920s and the two structures were being sold as one property. "They were two feet apart and they were attached at the back," Plumb said. "The city wanted us to preserve the older house."

So she devised a plan to demolish the 1920s structure, save the 1830 one and attach a contemporary home behind it on the spit of land between the old house and the shoreline. What followed was a long period of negotiation with the Pointe Claire administration to get permission, which was complicated by the stringent regulations that come into play when construction is done beside a waterway.

Despite the dilapidated state of the old house, Plumb and Dhindsa fell in love with it and ultimately saved it by disassembling and rebuilding it. "If you're an architect, these things don't daunt you," Plumb said. "We took down the little house by hand with friends; we had deconstruction parties. We saved everything that wasn't rotten and numbered every piece."

And what she discovered in the process was what she calls "a history of construction materials from the 19th and 20th centuries," which had been added in layers over 200 years. "We reassembled the structure as it might have been when it was originally built," she said.

The little building now houses Plumb's architectural office and, on the second storey, a home office for Dhindsa, who is a professor of biology at McGill University.

The next task was to create a home behind it that would not slavishly imitate the architecture of the past. "Also, you can't do an addition that would overpower the original structure, which is very small," Plumb said. "So we decided to create two separate, but attached houses." While the contemporary design of the new house with its taupe-coloured wood cladding is dissimilar to the stucco-covered old house, the two structures are visually well-meshed. "The old house remains on the street and the new one addresses the lake behind it," says Plumb, who worked with architect Gurdip Trehin on the design of the new space.

She also wanted to orient the structure according to the principles of feng shui, the ancient Chinese discipline of organizing spaces to facilitate the flow of chi, or energy. She turned to Tracey MacKenzie, a feng shui consultant and specialist in neuro design, who advised her to angle the house. "The new addition is skewed to be parallel to the shoreline," MacKenzie said.

Plumb designed the house to remind its occupants of the natural world that surrounds it. As a result, the ground floor is one large open space with generously sized windows that make the lake an ever-present feature. "There are beautiful visuals wherever you stand," says MacKenzie.

MacKenzie also worked with Plumb to create interiors according to the principles of the newly emerging field of neuro design, which addresses the five human senses. "Neuro architecture and design is about designing spaces that get the neurons to release endorphins," says MacKenzie.

Because human beings feel instinctively better in natural surroundings whether they are consciously aware of it or not, organic and ecologically friendly materials were used: bamboo on the floors, slate in the bathrooms and entryway. While the walls were painted white, they are covered in art, much of it pieces that Plumb created herself.

"Light should come in from two directions in a room because it nuances the space," says MacKenzie.

Plumb also had to address the question of the strong prevailing winds that whip off the lake year-round. "The wind was so strong that the doors leading outside to the deck, which opened inwardly, began to deflect," she said. "We had to rebuild the door frames so the doors now open outwardly."

The main consideration, however, in the design of the home was accessibility. Plumb's mother, who is 97, uses a wheelchair. "My grandson, Sam, who is 13, is also in a wheelchair," she said.

So an elevator was installed to connect the two storeys. And the open spaces of the ground floor allow Ivey and Sam to move around freely.

The bathrooms, the floors and walls of which are completely clad in tiles, are open spaces with wall-mounted showers and floor drains to facilitate wheelchair accessibility.

The kitchen, designed by Patricia Bukowsky and Scott Muldrew of Cuisine ? la Carte Kitchen Design, is a flow-through space. "Scott recommended a free standing island," Bukowsky said, adding that it contains a cantilevered surface to enable Ivey to sit at it in her wheelchair while her daughter cooks.

"The kitchen cabinets are a nodular point around which the whole house gravitates," says Plumb.

In keeping with neuro design principles, the kitchen island is slightly rounded. "Neuro design pushes the use of soft geometry," says MacKenzie. "You want soft curves rather than hard edges. This links to the primitive part of the brain, the amygdala. Seeing sharp lines and edges in your peripheral vision puts you on alert. Rounded edges are less threatening. The softer your environment, the more comfortable you feel."

Plumb wanted a visual treat in her kitchen so Bukowsky and Muldrew stained the maple upper cabinets yellow and lower ones red. The backsplash of aqua glass tiles is a reminder of the lake beyond the kitchen window.

One delightfully quirky element is the green concrete kitchen counters, in which are embedded several pre-historic fossils.

The restoration of the old property and the integration of the new one has been well accepted by the surrounding community. "I wanted this house to reflect the vernacular architecture of the village in a contemporary way," says Plumb.

After a lot of hard work, she has met that goal.