
A Glass House in the Rockies
In 2016, Brad and Lesley Wanchulak were living in a semi-detached home in Calgary with their two-year-old daughter, Ella. Their downtown semi was close to work—he’s a water management exec and she’s a health-care consultant—but space was tight. Brad grew up in the small town of Edson, Alberta, and had always wanted his kids to live in a community with plenty of outdoor room to roam.

That year, Brad was searching the web when he found his dream property: a three-acre lot surrounded by poplars and pines in Springbank, a rural community west of the city. Lesley was reluctant to give up the conveniences of downtown living. But after they visited the property, she fell in love with the idea of her children playing in a wide backyard and waking up with the Rockies in sight. The move would also be an opportunity to flex her design muscles—she’d previously renovated their Calgary basement and redecorated their home, and she ran a design blog called Mama by Design. So, the couple bought the land and embarked on a four-year project to build their forever home from scratch.

The first task was getting rid of the existing house, which dated back to the 1970s and had major structural issues. Serendipitously, a farmer in Edmonton wanted it for his property and even paid to transport it. This saved the couple the cost of demolition and allowed them to bank some extra cash for the new build. Lesley envisioned a Parisian-inspired home featuring natural materials like marble and wood. By the time the couple were ready to create drawings in the spring of 2017, they had a second baby, Sophia.

Lesley learned about the technical side of interior design on the fly: she took AutoCAD lessons whenever she could. She wanted sunlight to flood every room, with two storeys of floor-to-ceiling windows forming the back wall of the house. But her team warned her about the extreme Calgary cold: a home full of windows can lead to significant heat loss and higher electricity bills. Lesley didn’t budge. “The whole reason we got the house was because of the backdrop. It would be silly to live in a closed-off box,” she says. She got her way by cobbling together work from two manufacturers.

Lesley found workarounds elsewhere, too. She wanted the front doors to be giant steel arches, but discovered that the material’s sensitivity to drastic temperature shifts could cause it to warp and crack. She went to multiple fabricators until one said they could copy the design in wood, which handles weather changes better than steel. “They wouldn’t warranty it, but I didn’t care,” she says. When Lesley couldn’t find railings she liked for their curved staircase, she hired a blacksmith to weld a custom design on-site. “It took months. Every time I walked through the house, Gord was there, welding away,” she says.

The family moved in shortly after COVID started, in June of 2020. Their third child, Charlotte, was just three weeks old. Despite the lockdown, Lesley continued sourcing materials for the build. She wanted an antique-looking door for their laundry room and found wooden pieces from the early 1900s in Phoenix. She enlisted her husband’s uncle who lived nearby to make a deal and ship them to the border, where her dad picked them up in his truck. “It took a village,” she says. “I didn’t make it easy, but these details are why I love the house so much.”

These days, Lesley enjoys her home the most when it’s the site of events and parties, such as kids’ baseball team gatherings and family Easter egg hunts. This past summer, she and Brad hosted a Calgary Stampede soirée, where 60 friends danced while a DJ played music on a second-floor balcony. Charlotte is obsessed with unicorns and, for her fourth birthday party, the family hired a nearby farm to bring in goats, pigs, bunnies and even a pony decked out in a horn and streamers for unicorn rides.

Lesley says that, regardless of the season, guests who walk through the front doors say the same thing: “Wow, that light is fabulous.” Every time she cooks dinner on her Lacanche range—which took six months to arrive from France—she admires the European design. And when she’s reading to her girls at night in their bedrooms, she gazes at the tiny touches she hand-picked—like a vintage light fixture or a painting by her mother-in-law—and is glad she spent the extra time to make the space just right.