Engel & Völkers Vancouver
10635 Wood Bay Ridge Road, Halfmoon Bay, B.C.
Asking Price: $2,695,000
Taxes: $8,260.98 (2025)
Lot Size: 4.32 acres
Listing Agent: Sue Scott, Engel & Völkers Vancouver
The backstory
The common idiom about “the best laid plans” warns us that even grand intentions may not work out as intended. But the poem it’s sourced from is also about building your own home.
The house that Holger and Reingard Mandler built on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast is considerably more elaborate than the nest built by a mouse that Scottish poet Robert Burns laments the accidental destruction of in the 1785 poem To a Mouse. And to be clear, their house was not destroyed by a farmer’s plow. But, like the mouse, the couple spent a lot of time and effort to build it. The great bard of Alba is perhaps a little melodramatic in his warning that “the best-laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry and leave us only grief and pain.”
In fact, unplanned-for outcomes lead to a great many good things in the lives of the Mandlers. For example, when the couple travelled to Canada in the 1990s for postsecondary study, they had no intention of emigrating permanently from Germany.
“We didn’t really have any big plans,” said Mr. Mandler. “But once we lived in Canada, we liked everything about it. Germany is quite a crowded country. We are city people … but we appreciate nature.”
Mr. Mandler’s career in oil and gas took him to Calgary, where the couple bought an acreage in the Rocky Mountain foothills. But then work took them to Houston, where they lived in the city’s downtown core. As they approached retirement and began house-hunting back in Canada, they were looking at Vancouver because of their school days connections and vacations they’d taken to the wilder parts of the West Coast.
They also hadn’t intended to custom-build a home, it was only after viewing a recently completed one by their eventual builder that they realized what they really wanted was something uniquely to their taste and needs to retire in. They found the land, solved a number of topographical and design challenges to build their home and moved in thinking they were done with both work and the urban rat race.
“I thought I had retired,” said Mr. Mandler. “Then it took about two three weeks for me to learn that I’m not ready for retirement.”
Best laid plans indeed.
The house today
The house is about 10 minutes north of Halfmoon Bay along the Sunshine Coast Highway, one of a dozen or so compounds carved into the ridges and forests along the Straight of Georgia.
The modernist structure mixes black metal roofing and flashing with wooden posts and beams supporting broad verandas over what looks like cedar shake but is much more durable Hardie board concrete-fiber siding. The front door sits on a high point on the lot, but the house climbs down a ridge of rock inverting the usual structure of bedrooms above the main living areas.
“We could have chosen to dynamite it to make a flat pad,” said Mr. Mandler. “But the challenge presented a real opportunity to do something special, we ended up building a house with one story [below] that is half the size as the upper one.”
Patios and decks wraps around the house from the upper and lower levels but the formal entryway is on upper level off the driveway: a sheltered porch opens directly into the main living space with west-facing windows that fill the room with light.
This space is defined by a post-and-beam grid of wood beams with white walls or glass in between. It’s not too rustic, and not too contemporary, it’s a fusion with some inspiration from the other side of the Pacific, too.
“Whenever I saw photos of Japanese architecture I reflected on the serenity of those spaces,” said Mr. Mandler. “The room dimensions are laid out on a tatami-mat scale – they are all multiples of three by six-foot rectangles – we have that in the main rooms.” There’s also a lot of indoor-outdoor spaces, and the brushed concrete patios are also measured out into tatami-mat scale blocks.
The main living area is anchored by an atriumlike central chamber with an extra half-wall of windows that raises the roof line: in this space is a central seating area and a dining room. Next to the dining room the ceiling lowers a bit and a contemporary kitchen occupies the end-wall with a sliding door walkout to a patio deck; on the opposite end of the space a double-sided fireplace in a contemporary steel box separates a second lounge/TV room that is raised a step above the other seating area.
The stairs down to the lower level sit toward the back of the house (at the very end on this level is a second bedroom/office), and a reading nook with circular porthole window sits next to the staircase.
The primary suite occupies the lower level, toward the forest side of the house is the bedroom with a walkout to the lower west-facing patio (sheltered by the deck above). The primary ensuite bathroom is like a sauna or spa made of wood panels and glass walls, there’s no need for privacy shades because the closest neighbour on the same level is on the other side of the Straight on Vancouver Island. The stand-alone tub is in the northwest corner surrounded by glass, with one side shielded by the tunnel between the house and the rocky ridge (another adaptation to the topography) and the other with views to the water. There’s also more sliding doors: does that mean you can bathe al fresco?
The house is not too rustic, and not too contemporary, it’s a fusion with some inspiration from the other side of the Pacific.Engel & Völkers Vancouver
“Oh you bet, it’s awesome,” said Mr. Mandler, “You can hear the nature, the air is fantastic, you can smell the cedar … it’s wonderful.”
It might also be tempting to use it to clean off their golden retriever who is also a big fan of bathing … in the puddles and ponds found across the acreage.
Those plans were best laid
Again, the fit and finish of the house was done for a couple planning to never leave.
“Most Germans when they buy a house they live in it until they die,” said Mr. Mandler. “That’s why they are more expensive to build and many aspects are much higher quality, they value that more.”
Even the large separate double garage (off the front of the house) was planned for the future: It’s fully plumbed in and a dividing wall could be added to make a studio, workshop or guest suite.
That is why it’s all the more bittersweet that they are changing their plans. The reasons are twofold: unlike them their son didn’t travel around the world for work, he’s putting roots down in Calgary; they also found that despite the splendid isolation of their new home, they may have a little too much city in their blood to quit it for good.
“It’s very nice to live in a big city, there is theatre and museums, cafés,” said Mrs. Mandler, all things that are easier to enjoy if it’s walkable, and not a day-trip by car. Much like how her husband wasn’t quite ready to retire, neither of them were quite ready to only live in the mountains.
In Mr. Burns’s poem the farmer is envious of the mouse, who lives in the moment and unlike humans doesn’t fear the future or regret the past; that’s a lesson the Mandlers embrace as well.