Q & A with Lisa Rapoport: How to avoid overexposure

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Q: With the renewed passion for Modernist-style architecture, we're seeing houses with walls of glass inserted into traditional Toronto neighbourhoods. Are people more willing to live with their lives on display to the street?

A: They're willing to live with that for a short period of time. It comes out of the Modernist ideal, like the Farnsworth House, designed by Mies Van der Rohe for Dr. Edith Farnsworth in Plano, Ill., where it is a historically protected landmark. There is a penchant for architecture right now that finds that as its legacy. It's a steel box in the middle of the woods, where there's no need for privacy. Except that Edith Farnsworth had a real issue with it – even in the woods. Like when she had architecture students coming up and putting their noses to her bedroom window.

Q: So people embrace the architecture but they don't necessarily think about the experience of living in such an open environment?

A: There's a kind of glass paint brush and it's sometimes too broad. There's a careful crafting of light that architects have to do. All light all the time isn't always good. It's sometimes really nice, but it's also hard to live with. This is the message we hear a lot.

Q: Do you also come across homeowners who are blasé about or even titillated by being so exposed?

A: In the Annex, there's a house by a well-known architect that's beautiful but very exposed. The people obviously like living like that. And we were in Amsterdam walking around and the houses were almost right up to the sidewalk.

You could see right in. It was really weird and voyeuristic. We said "wow – they have a completely different relationship with their neighbours." It's very confrontational in a way.

Q: Have you known people who have retreated from that openness?

A: There was an Edwardian in Rosedale that was a beautiful Modernist project. The idea was that you could see right through the house from the front door to the garden in the back. It had a floating stair, it was perfectly lit from back to front. When they came down that stair at night, people could see everything. [The owners]loved the renovation but they hated being exposed like that.

Q: How did you solve the problem?

A: We did a kind of broad plaza. We used very tall grasses planted between the stones. We brought the grasses in as far as we could. The address number is set low and very close to the street so people don't have to be peering at the door to see the number. We also planted two very tall columnar birch trees so they could grow up eventually. They needed to be very fast-growing. The owners were incredibly bothered by the problem. They needed a fast solution.

Q: What are some of the other common challenges clients have presented to you?

A: A lot of people are putting a glass box on the back of a turn-of-the-century house. The backs are wide open to the gardens. That's what started us doing gardens. Because once you've opened up the back, you want to have something to look at. In one case, the people had moved the kitchen to the front of the house. We created a very, very dense landscape the whole way – from the sidewalk right up to the front of the house.

So in this case it wasn't to give the people inside more privacy, it was to give them something to look out onto.

Q: Do you encourage clients to shield themselves from the eyes of the neighbours?

A: No. There's no judgment on our part. It depends on how much you're exposed and how much you want to mitigate it and how. You can deal with it in various ways – you can have a stair at the front of the house that blocks the view from the street.

You can plant a big tree outside. In one bedroom we did a whole system with resin panels and black-out curtains. It's an architecture problem and a landscape problem. Having both of those work together is part of the solution.