Twenty-five years ago, when I moved into the elderly, former tool-and-die factory I’ve called home ever since, the style of such residential overhauls in Toronto ran to a type you might call Hard-Hat Sublime.
Architects and their clients, back then, preferred to leave the structure’s concrete or steel skeleton and rough brick fabric visible and unbeautified in the new condominium apartments. Air-conditioning duct work was exposed, lighting fixtures and windows were industrial-size, and original concrete or rugged wooden flooring was often preserved, bare and not broadloomed. Interiors were to be austere, minimal. Chintzy upholstery and coziness of any sort were outlawed. Such was the vogue, anyway, a quarter-century ago, when the conversion of Toronto’s obsolete workshops and warehouses into housing was getting seriously under way.
As every design orthodoxy tends to do, however, Hard-Hat Sublime has mellowed over the years. This strategy of renovation still recalls the old building’s blue-collar origins, but without letting industrial plainness dictate every detail of the layout and furnishing.
A couple of weeks ago, I visited an excellent example of this newer way of transforming and outfitting a former factory. It is located on a Victorian residential street on the city’s lower east side, and it belongs to composer Steve MacKinnon and saxophonist Colleen Allen.
When Mr. MacKinnon and Ms. Allen bought it in 2010, the structure they had to work with was a gloomy, glumly functional pavilion of brick and cinder block embracing 11,000 square feet of territory distributed over two levels. It fronted directly onto the sidewalk, covering its 50-foot-by-110-foot site entirely, so there was no room left for a garden or parking garage or a front porch.
From this chunk, the couple wanted to carve out a spacious, comfortable residence for themselves and their teenaged daughter, a practice and rehearsal space for Ms. Allen, a recording and writing studio for Mr. MacKinnon, and plenty of storage area. And they wanted their factory, at the end of the day, to look like a factory, as practical and low-profile as it had been when full of machinery.
For help with realizing their various ambitions, the couple turned to Toronto architect Richard Librach and the interior designers at Blue Hat Studio. Here are some things that have come out of the close collaboration among the artistic professionals and the owners.
Mr. Librach has preserved the old streetside façade of dun and red brick so faithfully, for example, you might not guess that anyone lives and works behind it. In fact, it looks so little like a home (however defined) that, upon my arrival at the address, I thought I had come to the wrong place. Mr. MacKinnon said his daughter thinks it has the charm of a Shoppers Drug Mart. I disagree. It has less charm than a Shoppers – all the charm, that is, of what it is: a very ordinary workshop front after a renewal in the hands-off manner I’m calling Hard-Hat Sublime.
Or this is the way it can seem until one stops, looks closely and sees – as I did, eventually, after driving past the front a couple of times – that an oblong has been quietly subtracted from the lower storey of the façade. The front door and the entrance to a parking pad and passageway are in this inconspicuous cavity, which, at a glance, can be mistaken for a loading dock.
This passage leads deep into the building’s centre, which Mr. Librach has hollowed out to create a secluded, high-walled courtyard. Framed by a wing containing the family’s living quarters and by a rear wing in which Ms. Allen practices and works, this garden seems more European than Canadian – a delightful spot of the kind one can find in countries where courtyard housing is more common than it is here.
Once past the front door, the visitor can better grasp how well the old and the new have been married in the interior design.
The wooden bones of the building – the tall pillars, the beams and rafters – are doing their work in full view. The floors on the first level are concrete, as they were in the original structure, though now they are warmed by embedded heating circuitry.
Long lines, large glazed openings, a sense of breadth and airiness, the unadorned, unconcealed wood and concrete, uncomplicated appointments – these features recall the machine-age character of the former workshop, but without interpreting it too seriously. Their straightforwardness and suave efficiency also seem appropriate in a project that’s still very much a workplace for the busy musicians who own it.