If an architect's career were a novel, then each building would be a chapter.
Early chapters would be houses — the architect's own would be a small but significant crescendo — and later ones would deal with bigger commissions. Along the way, villains would take the form of meddling city officials or developers out to make a quick buck, and the book's climax would be the chapter containing the first megaproject, be it a large tower or public complex.
While the book would end with the architect's passing, the irony is that many chapters would remain unfinished, since architects routinely hand their creations over to the stewardship of others. The odds of an unsympathetic renovation or, worse, a demolition ending many of those chapters would be high.
Judy Mandel just beat the odds.
A few months ago, she spotted a house for sale around the corner from her own Lytton Park home.
Perched on the edge of a small, shady ravine, the sturdy, brick, modernist box had been designed as a speculative home in 1978-79 by her architect husband, Raymond Mandel, who passed away last September.
During an agent's open house, she went to see it with her kids and then again with her next door neighbour, who also owns a home designed by Mr. Mandel.
"Each time I went in I just saw that this is a terrific house," she says. "I was very concerned about what was going to happen, but it never occurred to me that I should buy it."
Until an over-the-fence conversation with that same next door neighbour, that is. In less than a week and before the general public got to take a stab at the home, she put in an offer that was more than the asking price and was successful.
Ray Mandel was born in Poland in 1935 and spent a frightening childhood running from place to place with his family to avoid the Nazis. He lost his mother and a brother in the process and came to Toronto by way of Paris in the late 1940s.
He went to Central Technical School and was one of only two in his class to go on to university.
Mr. Mandel designed a home for his father and stepmother while still a student at the University of Toronto, graduated in 1957 along with noted architect Harvey Cowan, and met his future wife at a campus dance in 1958.
He worked for architect Henry Fliess briefly, after which he set up a short-lived partnership with Don Bolton (later of Clifford Lawrie Bolton & Ritchie) and George Buchan, using the living and dining rooms of his rental duplex at Church and Isabella streets as an office.
By 1962, he was a solo practitioner designing his first big commission, Royal York Gardens (1137-1141 Royal York Court), a gently curving, 10-storey modernist apartment building with sawn-off terracotta pipes for balcony walls. Interestingly, under construction at the same time on the other side of the Don Valley at Broadview and Gerrard was Chapman & Hurst's curved, nine-storey modernist Riverdale Hospital, which also used terracotta pipes for decorative effect on its balcony wall.
In the mid-1960s, Mr. Mandel designed another megaresidential project, the Old Mill Towers, which, according to its brochure, was aimed at "adults in the better-income group."
By this time, he was working on plans for his own custom residence, a strikingly modern composition of stacked glass boxes trimmed with California redwood that was completed in 1968.
Thirty-nine years later, I'm bathed in light gushing through the two-storey living room windows of this house, while sifting through a stack of rolled plans, magazine articles and newspaper clippings — assorted chapters of Mr. Mandel's fruitful career — while Mrs. Mandel, 67, tells me how much they enjoyed living and working in this neighbourhood.
"Occasionally something would come up for sale in the area and we would buy it and build on it," she says.
"He did it just out of interest; he liked designing houses and he liked to fit them in with the street."
We stroll over to her new purchase and admire how delicately it sits on the challenging lot, assembled by buying portions of nearly unusable land from the homeowners on either side.
We shudder at what might have happened had a quick-buck developer squeezed a McMansion onto it.
Mrs. Mandel outlines her plans to gently modernize the kitchen, such as replacing the aging white laminate countertop with something equally "nice and crisp" like CaesarStone, and how she'll simplify an upstairs warren of dressing rooms, bedrooms and en suite bathrooms with a long central dressing area that maximizes the space.
A balconied room overlooking the living room may be glassed in to allow her future tenants to use it as an additional bedroom.
And speaking of tenants, Mrs. Mandel is not sure when she'll actively seek them or, for that matter, if she'll furnish the house or leave it a blank canvas for the renters. She's not even sure what the renovation will cost or what she'll charge for the privilege of living in such a well-designed home.
Then again, those things were never the point.
"The goal was to keep it and be able to enjoy a nice modern building on a beautiful lot," she says.
"I think it's a gesture to my husband because it was one of his babies."
Consider this chapter closed.
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