NOMI Resort sits on 43 acres along Elephant Lake Road in Haliburton County, Ontario. Quadrant Architects led the master plan, architectural design, and zoning coordination that turned an existing 18-room motel and restaurant into an approved year-round wellness destination. The expansion adds 51 private cottages, a 7,000 sq.ft. wellness pavilion, and a 4,500 sq.ft. lakeside restaurant and boathouse.
Resort expansions in cottage country live or die on this balance. Add too few units and the expansion doesn’t pay back. Add too many and you destroy the character that brought guests in the first place.
For NOMI, the answer was 51 cottages spread across 43 acres at varying densities. Clustered tighter where the topography and existing access road supported it. More dispersed near the lakefront where privacy and forest cover mattered more. Each cottage positioned individually for sunlight, sightlines, and lake views, not dropped onto a uniform grid.
The cottages range from 1,500 to 2,500 sq.ft., with massing and material palettes designed to recede into the forest rather than dominate it. The site reads as a designed landscape rather than a developed one, which for a wellness-positioned resort is the product itself.
The 7,000 sq.ft. wellness pavilion houses the yoga studio, swimming pool, fitness gym, and espresso bar under one roof. Each use has different acoustic, humidity, and circulation requirements. The architectural challenge was integrating them into a single building that doesn’t feel like a strip of unrelated rooms.
The pavilion uses natural materials, expansive glazing, and a circulation spine that lets guests move between functions without stepping outside in winter. Warm lighting and direct visual connection to the surrounding forest do most of the work of making a fitness facility feel like a retreat rather than a gym.
The 4,500 sq.ft. restaurant and boathouse is positioned for unobstructed lake views from the dining room. It works architecturally as the social anchor of the resort. It’s the building guests pass through arriving by boat, the building they gather in for dinner, the building they return to from the cottages and the pavilion. Three different arrival sequences, one building that has to read as the heart of the property from each of them.
A 43-acre resort expansion in cottage country involves more regulatory layers than a comparable urban project. The site sits within a township with its own zoning bylaw, in proximity to a lake that triggers conservation authority oversight, on land subject to environmental protection requirements affecting grading, setbacks, and stormwater management.
Master planning a project like this means resolving the zoning and environmental questions before the architectural design hardens. Setbacks from the lake, grading allowances, septic capacity for 51 cottages plus three commercial buildings, and parking requirements all interact. Solving them sequentially produces a project that gets redesigned twice. Solving them in parallel produces a project that gets approved.
Quadrant led the zoning and approvals work alongside the architectural design, coordinating with the consultant team on the engineering, environmental, and servicing components.
Related work: land development and severance · custom residential
Project lead: Sara Rahgozar, M.Arch, OAA. 416-357-5713 · sara@quadrantarchitects.com
