Discover our first BESIDE destination in Lanaudière
New ways of inhabiting the city, the forest and everything between
A/C may cool us down, but it’s also contributing to increasing outdoor temperatures and harming our connection to each other and with nature.
A vast amount of North America’s forest cover is owned by individuals. Many don’t realize how much they could be doing to improve biodiversity and ecosystem health.
Though insects are a part of our daily lives, they provoke strong and often negative emotions. And yet, they are precious allies of biodiversity. What if we learned to get to know them, so as to better appreciate them?
Against a tide of cookie-cutter neighbourhoods and instant polyurethane dwellings, the Rhéaume Gonzalez family immersed themselves in the joys and challenges of restoring a heritage home.
Mobile saunas are reinventing spa culture, making them more accessible in the process. Proponents of this new trend ask us to consider whether laughter may be just as relaxing as silence.
Wood products have an important role to play in addressing climate change, but so do healthy forests. The Laurentian timber industry in Québec is maintaining this delicate balance.
Erik Raschke takes an intimate look at the outsized role that reeds have played in the architecture and culture of the Netherlands.
A wave of artists migrating to Newfoundland’s Fogo Island are taking a modern approach to preserving local traditions.
DIY urban landscaping is the solution we forgot we needed.
Once stigmatized for its relationship to our intimate parts, the bidet has reconquered hearts and backsides. Here's the story of how a simple toilet accessory is changing our relationship with our bodies.
At the Innisfail Ski Hill in Alberta, the conveniences of modern resort-style skiing are nowhere to be found. But joy is plentiful and nostalgia runs deep.
For nearly a century, right up until her death on May 22 last year, landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander tended her garden, greened the concrete of big cities across the world, and sowed seeds that became forests.
In a garage that serves as his workshop, leather worker Patrice Didier — founder of The Robinson Company — celebrates the marks of time on objects designed to last for generations.
If they’re not simply abandoned, they are accused of wastefulness and pollution: cemeteries have a hard life in our current times. And yet, they can play an essential role — on both the environmental and human levels — for those who are still living.
How can libraries help make the world a greener place? The Greenpoint Library in Brooklyn lets the environment speak for itself.
In their Montréal studio, Lambert & Fils embrace the long route to invention.
Flamingo Estate is California’s most sought-after luxury CSA. Its founder, Richard Christiansen, is on a mission to restore our sensual connection with nature.
Indigenous communities across Canada are contending with severe housing shortages, but government programs have failed to invite participatory solutions. But the One House Many Nations initiative is offering a community-led alternative: small home designs that prioritize traditional wisdom and sustainability.
Green desking, or an office among the trees.
When Eric Letham and Spencer Duncan set out to construct a DIY sailboat to take them across the world, they didn’t realize that the process of building it would be their best adventure yet.
Catherine Bernier reflects on what led her and her partner to put down roots in a fishing cabin transformed into a tiny house.
The Steilneset Memorial, by architect Peter Zumthor and artist Louise Bourgeois, commemorates the women and men who were executed on Vardø Island, Norway.
Carmen Dee’s new home on Navajo Nation follows three principles: it suits the environment, it’s easy to replicate, and it will last a long, long time.
In 2019, a small group gathered in the BESIDE Cabins forest to create a special installation.
A service building in the heart of the Italian Dolomites, designed by the two brothers behind Pedevilla Architekten.
Alan Adriano MacQuarrie designed and built a workshop on his family’s land in La Vallée-de-la-Gatineau. He envisions it as a bridge between past and present.
When Maria Milans del Bosch decided to build a natural getaway in the Catskill Mountains, she brought together local resources and know-how with the traditional Japanese art of charring cedar.
Au Gré des Champs puts humans — and animals — back at the heart of the farm.
The off-grid artist residencies reinventing a Scottish tradition.
Exploring the schools of tomorrow.
A bath in the forest, the contrast between hot and cold, a crackling fire, silence, and the scent of eucalyptus: many kinds of therapy for the body and mind.
A walk with architect Brian MacKay-Lyons in Shobac, Nova Scotia: a place where history and modernity exist in harmony.
Despite the comfort and nostalgia it inspires, many are beginning to question the reign of grass. What if this plant, a remnant of the Middle Ages, was quite simply out of sync with our lives and our values?
This is a story of Polarhagen, a regenerative market garden, and two first generation farmers sowing seeds in Norway’s Lofoten Islands.
When he’s not in the operating room of the ER at Santa Paula Hospital, Californian Ross Monroe is converting his backyard into a community space for friends who, like him, want to live independently.
German architect Andreas Wenning makes treehouses, but these aren’t the rickety, makeshift constructions you remember from childhood. With his sleek, contemporary dwellings, Wenning has invented a whole new dream for life amongst the treetops.
In cultures around the world, saunas are everyday sites of immense social and spiritual importance, not least because they feel divine.
Ferdinand Ludwig dreams of turning cities into inhabitable forests. His research led him to the wettest place on earth, where bridges are made from living trees.
A transaction like none other.
In Norway, Tormod Amundsen and his team at Biotope design ‘invisible’ architecture; carefully crafted small shelters that must blend into and be absorbed by their earthly surroundings.
How Finnish entrepreneurs are reimagining the Nordic way of living.
Getaway provides unalloyed connection with nature, our travel companions, and ourselves.
“When I wasn’t snowboarding, I’d go back to the condo and feel confused. Being out in the mountains as often as we are, we have that connection to the environment. The way we were living wasn’t correlating with our values,” Eddy says.
November 7, 2023