The news that one has a serious illness, while never welcome, can focus the mind remarkably, and even give a jolt of fresh intellectual energy to the old human project of dwelling well in the here and now.
I am thinking here of Toronto entrepreneur Luiza Alexa, who was diagnosed with breast cancer about three years ago. The Romanian-born nuclear physicist turned kitchen and bathroom designer thereupon embarked on an intense study of living the green life, in careful awareness of nature and in the best harmony possible with nature and one's self. For Ms. Alexa, it was a spiritual and philosophical undertaking. But her inquiry also turned out to have a quite practical application.
Shortly before her cancer was discovered, Ms. Alexa and her husband, engineer Horia Gruia, bought a comfortably large Victorian row house in the vicinity of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Several renovations, of the gut-and-whitewash variety, by previous owners had left the old building a sad shambles, badly in need of a top to bottom fix-up.
There was water in the basement. The masonry was dilapidated. The acoustic barrier between the house and adjoining properties was flimsy.
But this was to be no ordinary overhaul. Armed with their new knowledge and appreciation of green technologies, systems and aesthetics, Ms. Alexa and Mr. Gruia decided to make their home a haven of environmental safety and a place psychologically conducive to health and healing.
The result of their work — done in collaboration with Drew Hauser, principal in the Toronto firm of Stanford Downey Architects — is an essay in gentle simplicity. It bears its environmental mindfulness seriously, but without rhetorical heaviness.
A visitor entering through the front door finds himself in a sparsely furnished living room lined with the Victorian brick, stripped of more than a century of coverings and restored to its original rough and handsome appearance. What's not brick in this house is covered by luminous, pale grey paint, selected for its property of zero off-gassing. The insulation is a soya-based spray foam, also chosen to avoid substances that emit chemical fumes.
In the basement, the floors have been crafted from abundant, quick-growing (hence sustainable) bamboo. Elsewhere in the house, the floors have been fashioned from oak harvested from Austrian tree farms (therefore at no loss to old-growth forests), and oiled to make efficient cleaning possible without the use of chemical solvents. These surfaces float on Gyp-Crete subflooring, free of fume-emitting glue. The water throughout the house is filtered twice, to cleanse it of whatever impurities remain after the city's normal purification process.
But this house is more than the sum of its various environmentally thoughtful moves. The inadequate soundproofing in the original structure was cured by reinforcing the walls on all three storeys.
At least as important, Mr. Hauser and his clients have rid the building of the blocked-up rear wall that Toronto's Victorian craftsmen liked to drop between the interior and the back garden. Light now washes the kitchen and adjacent dining area through large panes of glass, and a sloping skylight, running half the length of the house, illuminates a living wall composed of ivy, ferns and tropicals.
Designed by Toronto artist Horace Lee, this beautiful wall is the most attractive feature of the interior outfitting. Water seeps down through the roots of the plants, creating a cool, refreshing and exuberant moment within the otherwise minimal interior. This installation is surely the renovation's most vivid fulfilment of the owners' desire to bring the loveliness and peace of the natural world into their residential setting.
But as you might expect in a house decorated by two successful designers — they own and operate the top-end Dekla kitchen and bathroom shops in Liberty Village and on Yonge Street — there is more than one touch here of the luxury provided by the cultural world.
The kitchen, for example, is by the ultrachic Italian firm of Scavolini. No hulking fridge breaks the serenely clean horizontal lines of this kitchen: Food that requires cooling is put into cold drawers identical to the normal drawers for cooking utensils and such.
Like the Scavolini ensemble, where everything we expect from a kitchen is harmonized into a refined simplicity, the renovation itself is a blend of things that are often thought to be opposed: culture and nature, for example, or luxury and a keen awareness of the menaces in the technological environment.
Little is sacrificed here — surely neither health nor beauty — and what's accomplished is an interesting, sensitive balance of the clients' aesthetic tastes and their practical concerns. We would probably all be better off, living in such sane and sensible circumstances.
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