Even before you enter Michele Murray’s cottage in Stanhope, P.E.I., you sense what it’s like inside.

Pulling into the cul de sac, you look right through the building. Enormous windows, rising all the way up to the bottom of the trusses holding up the 26-foot ceiling of the great room, face both south, onto their little neighbourhood, and north, overlooking a salt marsh and then the dunes of Prince Edward Island National Park at Stanhope Cape.

The great room was designed with a purpose. “The landscape and the outdoors here is the main show. It’s the reason that you come,” says Murray. “When you sit in this room you almost can feel like you’re outside.”

With so much natural light, it’s rare that electric lights are needed in the room, enhancing that connection to the outdoors. The light changes with the weather. The windows also provide a front-row seat to the show wildlife puts on in the saltmarsh. Murray has counted as many as 50 blue herons fishing in the marsh. On winter mornings silver foxes stand out against the snow and ice.

“I was here a couple of weeks ago and there was a bald eagle that soared past these windows,” says Murray. “They’re enormous. When they’re close up, they’re truly huge.”

The great room is also meant to be the place where the family spends all its time inside. The kitchen, the dining room and the living room are all in this one space.

Connected to that goal is the design of the bedrooms, which are relatively small. The rooms for Murray’s 13-year-old twins are mostly filled with queen beds. There’s a small desk, but no room for any other furniture.

“It’s just really for sleeping,” says Murray. “I don’t think people would be reading a book in their room or studying in their room.”

This is just the family’s second year in the Stanhope cottage. It is a long-delayed realization of a dream that Murray has had since she was a child. When she was in Grade 2, her family bought a cottage in Toney River on the North Shore of Nova Scotia. They would pack up everything they needed and spend whole summers there.

The cottage was a simple one. There wasn’t a lot of space, but that didn’t matter. “Unless there was like a tornado outside, my mom would say, ‘See you guys later. You’re outside for the day,’” says Murray. “You just found adventure and hung out with the kids in the neighbourhood.”

It was an different world from her home in Halifax, where days revolved around the daily rhythm of school, and someone being a year or two older or younger than you seemed important. At the cottage that didn’t matter. There was no schedule except for the rising and setting of the sun, and you connected with whoever was around and made something happen.

It wasn’t just that the environment was different.

“You just kind of became a different version of yourself,” says Murray. “I wanted something like that. I always knew that I’d want to have the same thing for my family.”

But it didn’t come as quickly as she hoped. When she and her husband Mike Kilcup first got together they moved around a lot  — New Brunswick, Halifax, Toronto — and they never felt settled enough to consider a cottage. In 2016, they moved to Charlottetown. It seemed like this would be home, but now they had four-year-old twins and life was very busy. Cottage dreams remained on hold.

Then in 2020 came COVID and an unexpected opportunity. With the borders closed to visitors from outside of Atlantic Canada, cottages that were otherwise forever booked became available. The family rented a cottage in the Stanhope area for the summer. The dream rekindled.

“It was a magical summer,” says Murray. “We not only fell in love with the area, but it was a good reminder of the concept of a cottage and how important it is.”

They began to look for land and commissioned an architect to turn their ideas of what a cottage should be into a reality.

The building was finished in time for them to move in for their first summer in June 2024. The furniture wasn’t all there yet. No dining room table until late August, nothing in the living room until September. But that was OK. They weren’t there to be inside.

While her cottage dream did not come as soon as Murray had hoped, she says it hasn’t come too late. “That concept of opening up a different version of yourself, I’ve seen that in my kids already,” she says.

“They come to the cottage, and they want to talk about cooking projects and they want to watch a movie together or play soccer outside or throw the football. It’s all stuff that we can all do together.”