About three years ago, architect Cindy Rendely gave clients Alison and Trenton a sore thumb. Right there, in plain sight, too, where all the other storybook houses could see, and yet they thanked her for the privilege and moved in.
She also gave them a piece of jewellery so large that had one of them tried to wear it instead of their sore thumb of a house, they would have had a sore ear or wrist. Let's just say this giant jewel of a staircase isn't going anywhere but up to the third floor.
But there are no hard feelings, no bruised egos and no one got sore in this little story, which begins many years ago, strangely enough, when Ms. Rendely decided she didn't want to become a dentist.
She had come "from a home where you did physics, science and math," she says, and had studied those things at university with the intention of going into dentistry. But it just didn't feel right.
After living in New York City and having a group of friends that "legitimized the arts" for her, she began making jewellery out of "rubber and glass and plastic and found objects."
Confused? It'll all make sense in a minute.
Upon her return to Toronto, she trained as a goldsmith, jeweller and metal artist at George Brown College. Despite post-graduate success selling to gallery shops and retailers, she was uncomfortable making a living as a freelancer. In addition, the small scale was becoming frustrating. Not only would architecture allow her to build giant pieces of jewellery that people could live with, like staircases, she could create the jewel boxes that contained them, like houses.
It didn't hurt, either, that becoming a professional anything would cure her parents' collective toothache over her questionable life choices. So, at the ripe old age of 32, she enrolled in the University of Toronto's five-year architecture program.
After cutting her teeth at two local firms, she struck out on her own and formed Cindy Rendely Architexture (she's big on textures and materials). Her first clients, in Leaside, led her to her second clients, Alison and Trenton in Sherwood Park near Bayview and Eglinton.
While married to each other, Alison says she and Trenton were definitely "not married to the old house.
"We really like contemporary. … We want to be livable and warm and human but we don't need to keep the leaded-glass windows."
"I think if they did want something other than this, they would have had to have gone elsewhere," adds Ms. Rendely, who knew it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship when the couple produced a sheaf of magazine clippings featuring modern spaces.
"I'm the new kid on the block, building my portfolio, and I learned early in the game that I'm not trying to be everything to everyone."
Two main areas of the then two-storey house would be the focus of the renovation — the front elevation and the staircase.
The original facade was mostly obliterated by the addition of a partial third storey and the extension of the first-floor bay window all the way up to the top. A lone storybook survivor is the little gable over the front door, which proved too costly to remove.
"If we were starting with a blank piece of paper, we would have done something quite different," says Alison, who is nonetheless quite satisfied with Ms. Rendely's taking her "perfectly lovely traditional house" and "blowing it away."
Above the gable (minimized into a graphic element by painting it black) is the one thing that caused contention. Alison wanted a window for her cozy second-floor office, but Ms. Rendely couldn't figure how it could work with that darned gable. She resisted, and insisted a skylight would be enough.
"I remember one day finally calling her and saying, 'Cindy, I want you to understand, if there's no window in the office, there's no project.'" Thankfully, they both laugh at this story today.
The staircase was another story altogether. Dominating the foyer and part of the living room, it became the supreme act of friendship: trust. While the couple wanted something sculptural and knew Ms. Rendely could deliver, nobody, it seems, could articulate — via drawings, words, models or otherwise — what it would look like.
"There was an idea but the construction reality, the engineering reality and the cost were all unknowns and we just kept going and crossing our fingers," Trenton offers.
Ms. Rendely called in reinforcements. Vince Mariani of Mariani Metal Fabricators soon found himself sketching and working out equations alongside Ms. Rendely, sometimes directly on Alison and Trenton's foyer walls. What they conceived was a three-storey steel cage that the staircase could hang from like an earring. It worked, and this giant objet d'art touches the walls at only four points.
The underbelly was electroplated on the premises with metallic blue automotive paint, which doesn't scratch, and the wide oak treads were fabricated by Peter Kazanowski of True Wood Interiors, who did the millwork for the rest of the renovation.
When it was all over, the couple held an open house. Thirty people, many of them neighbours, tested the staircase that night (it's so strong it could support a few elephants), and not one complained about the sore thumb of Sherwood Park, which proves that good design makes for even better friendships.
"People come in and say, 'Wow, this is really amazing,'" Alison confirms.
"It became an art-piece in the space, which is what I was trying to achieve," Ms. Rendely says.
"We feel like we're living in a sculpture," Alison adds.
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