Some of the nicest houses in North York's suburban vastness are bungalows.
Thrown up by the hundreds on former farmland after the Second World War, they tend to be small, neat and modest in style, but situated on wide patches of lawn – just the thing for a couple starting a family. These houses have a certain plain, popular architectural integrity. They speak of the optimism many young Torontonians felt, circa 1950.
We'll miss these dwellings, after they've all been knocked down and replaced by the ugly, muscle-bound mini-castles now enjoying a vogue in Toronto's postwar districts.
That said, bungalows weren't designed to stand up forever. And people nowadays often want more elbow-room than they normally provide. Bungalows, it seems, are doomed by real-estate prices, taste and aging to disappear from the urban landscape without a trace.
Without a trace?
Not so fast.
Last week, I visited a new timber-framed, two-storey residence in North York that has not forgotten the basic logic, plan and simplicity of the bungalow it replaced. It is 21st century architecture – clean-lined, well-proportioned – that is deliberately rooted in the quick-built, mass-produced, franchise manner that once said “home” to a couple of postwar generations.
Here is how this place works.
Instead of filling up the 7,000-square-foot corner lot with a house almost that big – a common thing to do in this part of town – Toronto architect Reza Aliabadi, 41, set down his flat-roofed building exactly on the small foot-print of the one-and-a-half storey bungalow that had occupied the site.
Instead of making a visual splash – again, a frequent occurrence on the streetscapes round about – the façade is quiet, unassuming. Its geometry and grey stucco cladding are elegantly tailored in good modernist style, but it doesn’t do anything surprising.
In fashioning the 2,700-square-foot interior, the designer has paraphrased the symmetrical plan of the original bungalow, with its stair running up the middle of the square volume. This scheme for organizing living space was efficient and pleasant in 1950, and it still is.
But while keeping to the old layout in a general way, Mr. Aliabadi has made numerous moves of the inventive sort one rarely sees outside custom-designed housing.
The owner is a recently separated financial planner of west-Asian background who wanted a compact place where he could enjoy his casual, newly single life. Among other things, he asked the architect for a space, just behind the sky-lit living room, dedicated to the earthly pleasures of sipping fine liqueurs and smoking aromatic mixtures in a water-pipe with his friends.
(Well-to-do Victorian men, of course, regularly retired from the company of women to special quarters after dinner for port and cigars. But this is the first time I have seen what Mr. Aliabadi’s floor-plan designates as a “gentlemen’s room,” in a contemporary house.)
The owner’s request for plenty of natural illumination has been satisfied by large windows overlooking the back lawn. Skylights above the bed in the master suite and over the bridge that joins the master to two smaller bedrooms illuminate the upper level, while a light well two storeys deep draws sunshine down into the living room.
Mr. Aliabadi has carefully defined each space, instead of letting it flow seamlessly into the next, as in open-plan styling. The sparsely furnished living room, for example, is relaxed – but a gorgeous six-by-six-foot slab of unusual marble over the fireplace focuses the area. The handsome expanse of stone commands attention, and helps make the austere room distinctively masculine. (I know no other word for what the place felt like.)
Here, as he has done in other residential projects – perhaps more boldly elsewhere – Mr. Aliabadi is exercising some sensible push-back against the open plan.
Invented by pioneering European modernists to free people from the tight, over-articulated, heavily gendered layouts of 19th-century housing, the concept has become routine in thoughtful custom design.
So routine, in fact, that many otherwise interesting architects nowadays seem unable to imagine any other way to arrange spaces for living. But I can think of no compelling artistic reason why there shouldn’t be “gentlemen’s rooms,” or why the stuff of hard architectural framing – floors, ceilings, walls, openings – should not be as emotionally various and specific as the things human beings do within the territories so framed.
Perhaps architects have a thing or two to learn from the bungalow before it vanishes.
This North York house embodies a couple of those useful lessons. There could be others to be gathered before this housing type vanishes once and for all.