Drumkeeran House

Drumkeeran House is a 5,000 square foot country house of square-cut, dovetailed Western Red Cedar, designed by the architect Ted Murray. It stands on a private five-acre headland inside the bend of Ivey Lake, near Pemberton and about 45 minutes past Whistler. It has six ensuite bedrooms, a Great Hall with a stone fireplace and a dock of its own, and it is only ever rented as a whole house. The name comes from a townland farmstead in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, the ancestral home of one owner’s grandparents.

Guests book through Vrbo and Airbnb, where the house has 10/10 from 148 reviews and 5.0 from 94. Those look after the payment, the damage deposit and the insurance, so the site didn’t need to take bookings. Its job was to show the house as it is now, answer what a group asks before they book, and send them to Vrbo or Airbnb knowing their dates are free. The brief was a site that is neutral, led by its photographs, built to last for years and kept up by the people who look after the house.

The homepage opens full screen on the house at dusk with every window lit, from a new set of photographs by Katherine Moffat. The menu sits over the photograph in cream and turns solid once the photograph scrolls away. Along the foot of the screen runs a line that changes daily: the photograph’s caption, tonight’s sunset, the drive from Whistler and the Vrbo rating.

Ivey Lake bends in a horseshoe, and the house stands on the headland inside the bend. The next section draws the lake from OpenStreetMap with the house marked at the crown of the headland, beside what the house has, a line each.

The house is open all year, so each season has its own photograph and line: winter fires after a day at Whistler, long evenings on the dock in summer, still water in autumn and the trout season opening in spring. Four more pages walk through the house room by room, the six bedrooms, what to do on the lake and further afield, and the drive up the Sea-to-Sky Highway.

Booking has a page of its own. Book on Vrbo and Book on Airbnb sit side by side, each with its rating. Beside them is the next twelve months from the house’s own Vrbo calendar, so a group can see which nights are taken before they go anywhere. Anyone who would rather write to the house can, and the letter fills in their dates and group as they choose them.