The Globe and Mail

The condo conversion of old industrial edifices has been one of the best aspects of Toronto's downtown real-estate story for the last 20 years.

Dozens of big-boned factories and warehouses have been saved from the wrecking crews and given new lives as chic apartment blocks. And countless smaller structures – Victorian workshops in laneways, mom-and-pop corner stores, century-old manufacturing works on quiet residential streets – have become pleasant single-family homes or little multiunit complexes. It's all been a boon to dyed-in-the-wool urbanites who like the hard edge of life-without-lawns.

For an example of how interesting life on the edge can be, take the west side Toronto house of Peter Fleming and Debbie Adams. (He's head of furniture design at Sheridan College in Oakville; she's a graphic designer and a professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design.) Their dwelling began some 50 years ago as a plain steel-framed industrial box, stretched over two 1/2 residential lots along a street of ordinary houses. Until it was bought by Mr. Fleming and Ms. Adams about eight years ago, the building sheltered a contractor's workshop and warehouse.

Like many other people discovering Toronto's machine-age architectural heritage at the time, the couple looked past the humdrum exterior and saw the opportunities that lay within. Here was a one-storey space, free of interior supports, with a 13-foot ceiling, large windows and handsome horizontal steel beams supporting the roof. And the building was fairly spacious: 40 feet wide and 50 feet deep, with an ample weed patch out back that would later become a garden.

To transform the big shed's possibilities into realities, Mr. Fleming and Ms. Adams turned to architect Janna Levitt, principal in the Toronto firm of Levitt Goodman. Ms. Levitt's attractive renovation proceeded in two phases. The first, completed in 2002, involved outfitting the structure with the basic equipment of living. Grey concrete floors, with embedded heating elements, were poured.

A kitchen was built, along with a dining room and living room, each area flowing into the next without interruption by doors or walls. The wholly enclosed master bedroom suite, raised up a few steps from the living room level, was installed, and the back of the house was opened to the garden by huge windows.

In the second phase, done in 2008, Ms. Levitt created a light-filled attic on the roof that provides the couple with studios where they can work at home. Taken together, Ms. Levitt's two architectural interventions add up to an elegantly spare but inviting revival of the old building's fortunes. (The beautiful quarter-sawn oak cabinetry, designed and constructed by Mr. Fleming, and the pine frames on the tall windows, help warm up the interior atmosphere, which might otherwise be chilled by the building's austere geometry.) Because she was able to refashion the space with almost complete freedom from structural constraints, the architect could easily accommodate her clients' unconventional requests.

For example, upon entering the house by the front door, the visitor almost immediately finds himself, not in the living room, but in the ample kitchen. One does not linger here; there are only two chairs, and the eye is quickly carried beyond, into the dining area, with its fine table and chairs by the mid-20th century American designers Charles and Ray Eames. At a right angle from the kitchen-dining continuum, and parallel to the great windows on the garden, lies the living room, which is dominated by a fireplace surrounded by massive plates of iron. This bright L-shaped spatial arrangement, focused on the dining room table in the elbow of the L, generates an atmosphere of informal hospitality, of generosity toward the house's guests and toward the city beyond the windows.

The mood immediately changes, however, when one steps up from the living room into the master bedroom. The light that floods freely into the more public areas of the house is here reduced to a trickle. There are no views on to the exterior world from this small, very quiet inner sanctum, and the city, which seems close in other parts of the house, is as remote as the moon. Such is the concentric character of Ms. Levitt's skillful, highly effective scheme: The still, secluded bedroom at the heart of the project, the larger, brighter sphere where work, entertaining and most of life take place, and, finally, beyond the building itself, the pulsing realm of urban reality.