The Grotto | Architectural Photography Case Study — Victoria, BC

A Residential Addition Built Into Bedrock | Gonzales Bay, Victoria

Architect: Bruce Greenway, Greenway Studio Architecture
Builder: Frontera Homes
Location: Gonzales Bay, Victoria, BC
Recognition: Dwell Magazine’s Most Popular Houses of 2023 | Four 2023 ‘Construction and Renovation Excellence’ (CARE) Awards from the Victoria Residential Builders Association

The Challenge

The backyard of this Gonzales Bay home was dominated by a massive metamorphic bedrock outcrop — moss-covered, rain-smoothed, and deeply loved by the homeowners. When they approached architect Bruce Greenway about adding a private annex for remote work and family use, the instruction was clear: preserve the rock.

That constraint shaped everything that followed.

The Design

Rather than work around the bedrock, Greenway designed into it. Fragments of the rock were used to build a curving stone wall that extends from the outcrop into the interior, blurring the threshold between landscape and built space. Floor-to-ceiling glazing wraps the addition, pressing glass directly against stone – a detail adapted from desert southwest architecture and reengineered for BC’s rain-heavy climate with integral drainage and thick insulation. The glass-to-stone junction passed ASTM field testing and exceeds BCBC Part 5 requirements, a technical achievement that earned the project its Most Innovative Feature CARE Award.

The result is a space that feels both sheltered and exposed: warm Douglas fir overhead and underfoot, raw bedrock pushing through the walls, and south-facing light filling the room.

A custom maple nook by Duff & Co. anchors the room, serving double duty as a workspace and a family gathering spot. The bedrock wall curves behind it. Greenway’s handmade light fixtures — lantern-like sconces crafted from Douglas fir offcuts — punctuate the interior with warm, textured light.

The homeowners had grown attached to the sound of rain falling on the rock. The design team responded by installing a spout that collects and recycles rooftop rainwater, sending it cascading over the bedrock face — a trickling fountain that runs even through dry summer months.

Looking back toward the original house, the connecting doors reveal the material shift between old and new — a deliberate transition that keeps the addition feeling like its own place while remaining seamlessly linked.

The addition’s green roof, planted collaboratively by the design team and the family’s children with native mosses, grasses, and sedums, ties the structure back to its surroundings. Seen from above, the full footprint of the annex becomes legible — glass, stone, and living vegetation layered into the slope.

The Photography

Every project in TC Photography’s practice begins with a structured pre-shoot assessment, often including a walkthrough built around three tracks of questions: the finished work and the architect’s vision for it; the objectives the photography needs to serve; and the physical mechanics of the shoot itself. It is in answering these questions that architects often share the stories behind their decisions — stories that, once heard, become the real brief for the photography.

At The Grotto, that process proved indispensable.

Photographing this project required two sessions. The initial shoot coincided with mostly overcast skies and intermittent sun, which are workable conditions for the interiors but often limiting for the full exterior story. A second session was scheduled specifically to complete the exterior coverage under clearer conditions.

That second session was shaped entirely by something Bruce Greenway shared during the pre-shoot walkthrough. His intimate knowledge of the site — accumulated over the full arc of the project — meant he knew precisely when direct sun would fall across the full face of the addition. A stand of mature trees along one edge of the backyard created a narrow window of direct sun on the full face of the addition — and Greenway knew exactly when it opened. Satisfying that requirement meant shooting in harder midday light. It was the only light that told the complete exterior story.

The interior presented a different set of decisions. The central hero image (i.e., the homeowner at the custom maple nook with sunbeams crossing the Douglas fir floor) was constructed from four discrete frames: a base exposure of the scene, a separate frame with the model in place, and two additional frames capturing distinct sunbeam angles that broke through intermittently as cloud formations shifted across the midday sun. Those frames were manually blended in post using masking techniques.

Similarly, the warm timber surfaces and the cool bedrock wall each required their own properly calibrated exposures, then were composited together to hold both materials in the same frame without sacrificing the character of either.

The detail shots — the water spout cascading over the bedrock face, the custom lantern sconces on the support posts — emerged directly from what Greenway shared during the pre-shoot assessment. He described the homeowners’ deep attachment to the sound of rain falling on the rock, and how that attachment drove his decision to engineer a rooftop spout that recycles water over the bedrock face year-round, even through dry summer months. He described his deliberate choice to design the sconces himself from Douglas fir offcuts, rather than defaulting exclusively to pot lighting — listening carefully to what the homeowners wanted the space to feel like after dark. Those stories became compositions.

The photography didn’t document the project’s details so much as give visual evidence of the thinking behind them.

The Outcome

The images from this project have served Greenway Studio Architecture and Frontera Homes extensively. They feature prominently on each firm’s website and contributed to submissions that earned four CARE Awards in 2023: Best New Home Design Under 4,000 sq ft, Best Interior Under 4,000 sq ft, Most Innovative Feature, and Best Addition/Renovation.

Dwell magazine subsequently featured the project, and it was voted one of the publication’s Most Popular Houses of 2023.

TC Photography is an architectural and interior photographer serving architects, custom home builders, and interior designers across Victoria, Vancouver Island, and the Vancouver and Lower Mainland markets. To discuss photographing your next project, get in touch.

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