In Toronto, few people do serious renovations of apartments. When architect Donald Chong found such a job, it came with two other rarities: a true loft space, and homeowners ready to pursue design ideas down to the last, custom-fabricated, acutely angled detail.
He calls the result the Vessel Loft, after its most unusual feature – a curvaceous shed of white oak that wraps around the apartment’s doorways, home office and bathroom. Built with the watertight precision of a hull, it rests in the middle of the space like, yes, a ship. “It sort of slips in there and docks itself,” Mr. Chong says.
Mr. Chong’s clients, Tim Thompson and Matthew Campbell, were inspired by homes they have seen in other cities. In particular, the couple admired the many brick-and-beam warehouses in Old Montreal that have been turned into apartments – and set out to find one in their home town. “In Montreal, these spaces are like pigeons,” says Mr. Thompson, a banker. “But we can’t live in Montreal, so we said, ‘Let’s replicate that here.’”
In 2007 they bought a top-floor, corner unit in a condo building near St. Lawrence Market, one of the few developments in Toronto that deserves its billing as lofts. Built in 1915 as the factory for an optical company, it was converted in the late nineties and given a conventional, cheaply built condo interior. The couple had big plans for the space; They bought the apartment next door at the same time, and sought an architect to combine them into one, 2,350-square-foot home.
Mr. Chong soon signed on. As he recalls, the first conversations didn’t make clear how big their ambitions were. “Their main idea was to preserve the brick and beam nature of the space. The question was: How do we keep this what it is?” The architect, 40 – who worked for architects KPMB, Hariri Pontarini and Shim-Sutcliffe and taught in Switzerland before founding his office – rose to the challenge. He’s best known for a skinny, glassy house in Roncesvalles that fills a gap in its block while respecting the area’s traditional house forms.
Here, he decided to work once again with the materials at hand: Starting in 2007, he created a design that would leave the brick and timber shell of the building completely intact, and place the boldly modernist vessel inside it. “We effectively added a building within the original building,” he says. “The quality of the construction was a nod to the original structure.” The design language, however, is utterly different. It’s a sleek structure of white oak that presents a curvy, sculptural counterpoint to the squared-off rhythm of the outer walls.
As you walk through the loft’s front door, you’re pulled south straight into the vessel; a tight ceiling comes down above you, oak panels line the corridor on two sides, and windows open up to the kitchen on the left and the home office on the right. Keep walking, and you pop out of the vessel into an open living room on the south side of the loft. From here you can see the edge of the vessel meandering from the kitchen, in one corner, to the bedroom in the other. In between, the white oak wall tapers at different diagonals to define views and spaces along its length. “You gravitate to different levels of privacy,” Mr. Chong says. “It’s almost like a city street in that way.”
One detail: Stand in the kitchen, look through a window into the corridor, and your eye goes along a diagonal wall to the furthest corner of the loft. Look too closely and it’ll induce vertigo.
