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On my tours of other people’s houses over the years, I’ve found that what an architect likes best about his or her residential project can be revealing.

Many designers, for example, are proudest of the exterior styling and flair in the finished product. They tend to be the artists and poets in the architectural tribe.

Others – the philosophers – pride themselves on their handling of interior spatial flow, the rhythm of rooms and passageways, sequencing of volumes and voids. Still others, the craftsfolk, are quick to point out the care that’s gone into easily overlooked details – subtleties of baseboards and window frames, refinements of cabinetry and so on.

All photos by Ben Rahn/A-Frame

Then there are the tribe’s scientists, who delight most in the high physical performance and environmental efficiency of their handiwork. I discovered that Alex Tedesco is an architect of this latter sort when we stepped together into the mechanical room of a new house he has done (with associate Leigh Jeneroux) in north Toronto’s Bedford Park neighbourhood and he lit up.

As well he might: This basement suite contains the brains of his brainy house. Here are the mechanisms in the geothermal system that helps warm and cool the building, and here are the innards of the energy-saving air exchangers. Here is the computer that senses and separately regulates the climate in each room in the two-storey structure. It’s a sophisticated electronic gadget (the Internet era’s answer to the old-fashioned thermostat) that enables the house’s various sectors to respond sensitively and quickly to exterior temperature changes and sunlight conditions.

As Mr. Tedesco – a senior associate at the Toronto firm of LGA Architectural Partners – told me, concern for the long-term sustainability of his work informs every aspect of it, not just climatic conditions. The building envelope, he said, is “very tight.” Thermal bridges in the fabric have been blocked. For insulation, he has used mineral wool, a material with thermal conductivity almost as low as that of still air, and stayed away from petroleum-based products. The architect’s objective, as he put it: “the delivery of a healthy, durable house to my family. Aesthetics was less important.”

Indeed, bold aesthetic gestures were not wanted by Mr. Tedesco’s clients (who are also his cousins). The couple asked for, and got, a sturdy, energy-efficient place where they and their children can live comfortably together during the family’s current transition period – one child has moved on, two are still at home, though probably not for long – and where the parents can continue to live long after all the kids are gone.

The architect’s response to this request embraces 3,500 square feet of floor space, and features four bedrooms on the upper level and one in the separable basement apartment. Provisions have been made for an elevator, should one be required some day, and for solar panels, if and when they become practical domestic appliances.

As far as curb appeal is concerned, the brick-and-wood street-side façade is modest and unassuming. The roof is pitched, and the overall language of the structure is very polite – perhaps too polite – to the elderly housing on its middle-class street, deep in what was once a streetcar suburb. An opportunity has been missed, I think, for an experiment in creative design that neither sticks out nor limply conforms to what’s round about – that expresses in exterior form the up-to-the-minute character of its technical contents. But if “aesthetics was less important” than performance in the fashioning of this house, Mr. Tedesco has not left grace entirely out of the equation. The living room ensemble on the open-plan first level, for example, is gathered behind a handsome wood-framed glass wall and transparent corner that frame trees in the front garden. The stonework and wood detailing in the master bedroom’s en-suite bath is luxurious, sensuous to both sight and touch.

Notable, as well, is the arrangement for vertical circulation. Builders of Toronto’s Victorian houses too often treated the staircase (like the washroom) as a necessary evil, best left narrow, dark and mean. Here, in contrast, the stairwell is a lovely double-height interval washed by natural light and enclosing Mr. Tedesco’s muscular welded staircase of blackened steel – an homage, I understand, to a welder on the clients’ side of the family. This passageway between floors has been designed with the same quiet, craftsman-like thoughtfulness that the architect has brought to every other space within the house.

This project has come early in Mr. Tedesco’s career. It will be interesting to see what happens when an architectural job comes along that seriously challenges, not just the scientist and technician in him, but the artist as well.