Pictures of a modern Baby Point makeover
Toronto architect Paul Raff was asked to unsnarl, simplify and brighten the spatial flow of this Edwardian home in Toronto's Baby Point neighbourhood.Steve Tsai
The living-room level, floored with white oak planks, is sunken, and its quiet composition is completed by a very handsome, formally minimal fireplace finished with light, leathered Loire limestone above and, lower down, an expanse of chiselled black basalt.Steve Tsai
The original architects had left the rear facade seriously undersupplied with windows, thereby blocking the view toward the back garden and the lovely valley landscape beyond. That error has been corrected in Paul Raff's renovation.Steve Tsai
The architect fashioned the space for the new, elegant bulthaup B3 kitchen, for instance, by emptying the old kitchen, demolishing the walls that defined two small adjacent rooms and opening up the west-facing rear of this much-enlarged territory to the garden and valley. What was once an isolated, partitioned-off corner of the house has become a central gathering place for the family, and a spot no longer separated from green nature and the lights of afternoon and sunset.Steve Tsai
The kitchen, with its long island topped in stainless steel, is about efficiency and convenience and good ergonomics.Steve Tsai
The present owner, a software developer, grew up in the house. By the time, a few years ago, that he moved back in with his wife and two small children (there are three now), the limitations of the unrenovated space had become all too obvious.Steve Tsai