When Nancy Saar’s husband Grant first took her to the loft that would become their new family home, he warned her, “close your eyes.”
She opened them and found herself inside a 2,000-square-foot space in Vancouver’s Crosstown that was in dire need of an overhaul.
Its former owner was a skateboarding bohemian bachelor who had turned the loft in a 1907 heritage building on Beatty Street into a graffiti gallery/boarding venue/after hours party house. There were broken windows, spray-painted walls, cracked sinks, and ripped out baseboard heaters. Above an authentic red English phone booth on the lower level he had installed a rope swing that spanned the entire loft. The double height space near the spiral staircase was marred by the installation of a basketball hoop.
It took a bit of convincing from her husband that this party pad could become a baby makes three home in time for the birth of their first child, a mere six months away. “Picture it as an open, all-white space,” he told me, relates a then somewhat skeptical Mrs. Saar. “It was a little hard to imagine.”
But the young 30 something transplants from Toronto were keen to stay in the downtown core. They both worked in the area and did not want to repeat their Ontario experience of commuting from Thornhill to Front Street every day. They knew their 1,000-square-foot Yaletown condo would be too snug for a growing family, but they couldn’t afford to move up in the neighbourhood. Luckily, Grant happened upon the unusual loft space a mere 12 blocks away in Crosstown – a neighbourhood that was then on the cusp of gentrification but is currently a sought after area.
He could see the potential of the space, which boasted a winding staircase that spanned three levels – including a generous 500-square-foot roof deck, and 2,000-square-feet of living space. And so could designers Michael Leckie and Javier Campos of Campos Leckie Studio – a Vancouver based interdisciplinary design office.
“I was excited when Grant first showed me the space,” relates Michael Leckie, who became the project lead for the loft, a former warehouse that was one of Vancouver’s first New York style open plan loft conversions, retrofitted in 1981. While lofts typically only have access to light and air at one end of an extremely deep floor plan, he could see that the two storeys of south facing glazing allowed for a penetration of light deep into the space, and that the double height and ventilation from the top level roof deck door created a “natural draw of air through the space.”
But beyond the derelict state of the loft, there were other challenges, like the young couple’s tight budget and the imminent arrival of their first-born.
By the time their daughter Chloe was born, the basics were in place – like heat, lighting, plumbing and sleeping areas. But the rest of the renovation was done in stages, as budget, and a growing family (Chloe’s brother Max arrived on the scene two years into the reno) allowed.
The staircase in the middle that connected all three floors became the natural focal point for the renovation. The fact that the interior was so battered became a design “advantage,” says Mr. Leckie, as it gave him a wide berth from which to “reconfigure the space.”
In essence, his vision was to keep as much of the loft space as open as possible but to delineate individual areas through subtle shifts in elevation and a series of sliding panels in lieu of walls. Everywhere storage areas were designed as built in millwork and pushed up to the outer edges of the loft.
