Steven Fong upgrades the Toronto Modern home
Architect Steven Fong's update of the Toronto Modern style. The handsome pair of semi-detached dwellings each have different facades: one three-level semi has black brick, the other has light cedar slats. One streetside face is shorter and smaller than the other – though both, like good modernist buildings, sport rooflines that are dead flat – and each has a unique, attractively irregular configuration of windows.
A sensuous design impulse translates into tubs that hover in the large bathrooms, and patterns of circulation between bed and bath that are uninterrupted by doors or partitions.
The architect is especially proud of the steel-joist frame, which allows plumbing and electrical conduits to run through the skeleton of the house, thereby eliminating the need for bulkheads in the open-plan rooms.
Heating is supplied by hot-water pipes embedded in the concrete floors and the hot water itself comes from a high-performance Viessmann boiler that is compact enough to fit into a broom closet.
The window openings have been left relatively small – a nod, of course, to energy efficiency, but also a bid to create interiors that are more intimate and enclosed than those in modernism’s classic glass boxes.