When is an old Toronto streetscape so venerable or so picturesque that it should be strictly off-limits for an expertly designed house in a frankly contemporary style?
My answer to this question is: not very often – although Toronto’s Beaches is one district where caution may be well-advised.
Victorian and later development of the area as a summer-resort destination left it with an eccentric architectural legacy all its own, and an unbuttoned visual and cultural rhythm that has persisted on arterial Queen Street East and on the neighbourhood’s residential side streets down to the present hour. Were this legacy and its holiday spirit of place to be seriously interrupted, Toronto would be impoverished.
Most people nowadays, however, are not content to live in the Beaches (or anywhere else) as our urban ancestors did. Detached family homes put up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries tended to be ample, as far as gross square footage is concerned. But the space inside was too often diced into a lot of small, cramped rooms. Interiors were dark, washrooms were too little and too few, staircases were uncomfortably tight and badly sited.
Having bought a dilapidated, 1,250-square-foot Beaches home in which all these old-fangled conditions prevailed – the two-storey house was of Edwardian vintage – a couple with a taste for contemporary architecture knew they would have to put in motion a drastic overhaul to make the place liveable. But could the job be done in a way that gave them a modern residence without disrupting a traditional Beaches streetscape they admired and the community cherished?
In the $700,000 renovation he completed for this family, Toronto designer Johnson Chou has shown that it can be done, and how.
You begin by deciding what is distinctive about the house and should be kept for the neighbours’ sake, and what can be got rid of. You don’t abandon features that visually anchor the front of the building in its environment – the pitched roof, for example, or the large triangular gable at the attic level.
But this doesn’t mean you must keep the street-side façade exactly as you found it. Mr. Chou has given the front a contemporary lift by, among other things, replacing the old faceted bay window on the upper storey with a squared-off glass box, slicing irregularly spaced openings in the brick surface, and emphasizing the front door with a canopy and privacy screen. While not disturbing the fit of this quite ordinary house into its unostentatious context, these moves give the structure a spring and freshness that the fustier dwellings on the block might be envying.
Very little, if anything, behind the front façade was worth sparing. The interior was a clutter of shadowy rooms. The staircase up to the bedroom level, for some reason, had been placed athwart the building’s long axis, thereby cutting the lower storey in half. A rear wall blocked sight lines from the inside out to the huge old trees that are among the chief treasures of the Beaches neighbourhood.
Mr. Chou swept all this away, but he did not leave the open-plan interior blank, like a prairie. The little living-room ensemble, just inside the front door, is sharply differentiated from the kitchen area by a marble-topped counter that serves as a bar and snack table when people come over. The spacious family room, down a couple of steps at the rear of the first level, is a pavilion Mr. Chou created by pushing the house about five metres into the deep back garden. This place is brightly lit, during the day, by a floating, west-facing wall of glass two storeys tall. (Perhaps too brightly: The owners are considering blinds or drapes to reduce the glare.)
In terms of design quality and integrity, several details and discrete moments set this project apart from more usual renovations of elderly houses. One is the beautiful new staircase, a spare, airy flight of steel steps cantilevered from the wall and enclosed in clear glass. Its styling guarantees that the overall lightness of Mr. Chou’s scheme is extended even to the connection between floors. Staircases crafted by architects often look like orphaned afterthoughts, but not here.
The stair ends in the attic, which has been converted into the couple’s bedroom suite and outfitted with a deck overlooking the garden. It’s an eyrie perched in the treetops. Furnished with wide windows fore and aft, this open space under the rafters is intimate, delightful, though not cute – and as thoughtfully contemporary as every other aspect of the project.
But however clean and clear its insides are, the house doesn’t brag to the street about its modernism – which, given the neighbours’ dislike of buildings newer than the Jazz Age, is only good manners.