Northern Exposure

Words by Sam Eichblatt
Photography Ben Rahn

A renovation of a Toronto condominium by GH3 architects embraces dynamic forms and a monochromatic palette.

Roughly twice the size of Auckland by population, Toronto is Canada’s largest urban centre and is filled with a similar jumble of architectural styles and a skyline defined by the CN Tower – the world’s tallest freestanding structure until 2007. A construction surge from the 1950s onwards has resulted in a proliferation of residential housing blocks for a quickly growing population, though the city itself has no single dominant architectural idiom.

“I’ve been practising here for about 30 years, and over that time there have been improvements,” says Pat Hanson, lead architect for the GH3 architecture practice. Echoing a sentiment expressed by many New Zealand architects and designers, she says that the general population of Canada does not expect enough from the built environment – or invest enough in it. “As a culture, we haven’t evolved enough yet. As a nation, we’re not as aware of our cities and our buildings as we should be.”
The fact that foreign architects, including Frank Gehry, Will Alsop and Daniel Libeskind, have been called in to work on several civic projects over the last five years has, says Hanson, helped by focusing public attention on architecture. “There’s certainly been local resentment, but it has also raised the level of discourse.”
For an avowed modernist like Hanson, this residential renovation job, which turned the cramped interior of a 1970s building into an urban loft-style minimalist space, was a gift project. The detached townhouse in a row of ten built to a roughly Brutalist template had undergone a series of renovations over a forty-year period that weren’t sympathetic to the original structure.

“They’re actually quite fine buildings underneath,” says Hanson. “But by the time the current owners bought it, it had undergone a sort of colonial makeover on the interior.”
Nevertheless, the owners knew true love when they saw it. Located on one of the roads that negotiates a ravine escarpment from one part of the city to a lower part of the city, the three-bedroom property is a narrow, bar-shaped building with a roughly 6 by 21m footprint. The slanting site offered privacy for the back garden and, crucially, also for the front of the building, which sits a storey above the street entrance to the garage.
The first challenge was the interior of the ground floor, which contains the kitchen-dining area to one side, and the living area that opens on to the garden to the other. During a previous renovation it had been divided into smaller spaces. “The building isn’t configured to make separate rooms and retain a sense of spaciousness. It was built at a time when eight-foot ceilings were considered perfectly comfortable,” laughs Hanson. It seemed logical to strip it back and open the space up to an even greater extent than the original design. “We really wanted to take it back to its bare bones.”
The idea was met with much approval by the new owners, a couple who were raised in architecturally designed houses themselves and have an appreciation for modernist architecture and a minimalist approach to interiors and lifestyle. They also owned a “pretty sophisticated” collection of modern furniture, says Hanson, including pieces by Eames and Saarinen.

A key element in opening up the space and making the building more agreeable during the day is a new two-storey window wall on the garden side which brings natural light in to the core of the house, and gives a sense of expansion from the inside to the outside to the rear lawn. The master bedroom, which is above the living area, also benefits from the glass wall, while the sides of the ravine maintain complete privacy.
Inside, the team gave structure to the resulting loft-like space by creating three major architectural elements to create a domestic scale and organise the flow of the ground floor. In the kitchen, they built a large island with statuary marble, with one level for food preparation and second lower level for use as a table for both everyday and formal dining. “That piece grounds and establishes the domestic zone of the kitchen,” says Hanson.
The second element was the spiral stair. Original to the building, it had what Hanson describes as “the worst kind” of wrought iron railing common to many Toronto homes. However, it did work with the shape of the stairs, so the team simply over-clad it with drywall to create a sculptural, curvilinear focal point to the room. Lastly, they created a six metre white marble bench that runs the length of the living room and also acts as a hearth to the fireplace. The kitchen working area, as well as storage for pots and pans, dishes, books and media, is now positioned along the exterior wall behind built-in, floor-to-ceiling doors.

Though GH3 specialises in sustainable architecture, at Russell Street they found a lot of standard features, such as good insulation to cope with the city’s cold climate, already in place. Hanson added operable skylights for the owners to vent heat during summer, and used high-performance glazing and low VOC paints throughout the house.
Upstairs, the original room configuration – the master bedroom separated by a bridge from the bathroom and two fairly small, narrow bedrooms (one of which is used as a study) – remained the same.
Hanson maintained the aesthetic used downstairs by painting most surfaces white or using fabricated white Corian for areas that would come in for more wear, including the bath, shower and wet room walls. The wooden floors and the stairs were stained a near-black, providing a striking contrast. “I tend to favour a really monochromatic palette unless I’m forced to do otherwise,” says the architect. “In this case, the owner was completely sympathetic to it – they were keen to keep really simple white walls. In one large space it is difficult to add multiple wall colours, and there was enough interest with some of the elements in the space and with her furniture to work with that.” This project may look black and white but that’s only a foil for its intricacy.