The Globe and Mail

Architectural classicism has enjoyed an extraordinary run of popularity since its revival in the Italian Renaissance. Though the style is out of vogue for public buildings these days (except in Britain), people of private means in Europe and North America continue to commission country and city mansions featuring the Greek and Roman business of columns and entablature, sedate proportions and rhythmic façade treatments. The results we’ve seen in recent years are very various. Some look like little ancient temples blown up with bicycle pumps. Others are merely pretentious, pretty trifles, like so many scaled-up doll houses larded with classical ornaments.

But one occasionally finds a contemporary house in a classical manner that brings honour to this quintessentially Western tradition. A residence of this kind is called Villa Charax, and is located on a shady ravine drive north of Davenport Road in Toronto.

Designed for a family of five by the British architect and scholar Demetri Porphyrios, in collaboration with Bill Arnold, his connoisseur Toronto client, this steel-framed Greek Revival project shows a modest (though hardly meek) face to the street. The simple façade is evidence for the unusually mindful attention the owner gave to the crafting of his house. An early proposal for the house-front by Mr. Porphyrios had two Doric columns flanking the doorway. But the columns had to go, Mr. Arnold told me, due to their traditional connotations of power, wealth, prestige. The façade of an urban villa should be refined but unassuming, he believed, and so it became: an elegant symmetrical composition of light stucco surfaces (inflected by small windows), pale French limestone trim, and large, dignified mahogany doors standing atop a flight of steps in Belgian Blue Stone.

The exterior combination of formal simplicity and a handsome material palette is carried through into most of the interior, to highly pleasing effect. The expansive neoclassical drawing room, for example, is framed by high ceilings, tall portals with solid walnut pocket doors, and white oak floors. These strong structural features and the room’s sparse appointments – a Florentine fireplace, Venetian wall sconces, a few chairs fashioned by the owner from a 1920s art moderne French original and drawn into a circle around a small glass table – create an atmosphere of calm but alert reflection, a philosophical setting for, let’s say, spirited conversations among friends about high matters of art and culture. I can’t imagine trivial chit-chat in this room: The very walls would cry out in protest.

But despite their austerity, the drawing room and the adjoining dining room manage to be quite comfortable. One reason is the beauty of the furnishings – the dining table is a remarkable contemporary reworking of neoclassical furniture themes – and another is the proximity of these rooms to the neat, symmetrical garden and, beyond the garden, the treetops rising from the plunging side and remote floor of the adjacent ravine. This architecturally directed view of culture (the garden) abutting nature (the woods), of the sharply separated realms of the tame and the wild, would have delighted the Greek Revivalist architects and their fans in the early 19th century; and, as we find in the thoughtful landscaping of Villa Charax, it’s still a vision of that primordial Western duality with the power to charm.

The other spaces in this house – the library, the sitting room and kitchen, the four bedrooms upstairs – tend to be somewhat more forgiving than the principal rooms, without being any less rigorous in detail. And the deck on top of the building, reached by a tightly spiralling staircase from the second floor, is a wonderful refuge high in the treetops.

I do have one hesitation about Villa Charax, however, having to do with the entry hall. Washed by sunshine descending from a skylight, this large room is clad in sumptuous materials, including Carrara marble and much reddish-purple imperial porphyry quarried from the Egyptian desert and polished in Florence. A foyer, it seems to me, should be a prelude to the house beyond. But apart from its fine proportions, the bright entrance pavilion gives little indication of the restrained, attractively shadowy interior spaces to come.

That said, I admire almost everything else about this project – the imaginative and never slavish fidelity to neoclassical precedents (especially the work of the client’s favourite historical architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel), the superb craftsmanship, the unfailing attention to detail. I wonder at times whether classical building design has any place in the modern world – whether it’s an exhausted enterprise, with a glorious past, and no future at all. But Villa Charax is proof that the classical language of architecture has life and fire in it yet.