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For many architects, a career in building often begins with the personal, their own residences providing an opportunity to test out new ideas and techniques and serving as calling cards to prospective clients. In most of Canada's major cities, expensive real-estate realities have made such experimentation more difficult these days. But these three firms have found ways to beat the tight constraints of space and budget to express themselves freely and dynamically.

Northern (re)exposure

After working in the United States for 10 years, architects Jodi and Andrew Batay-Csorba approached a Toronto building type uncommon south of the border – the semi-detached home – with renewed interest and vigour. The result: an unusually airy urban space with plenty of (hidden) storage

After an absence, the familiar becomes strange.

When Canadian architects Jodi and Andrew Batay-Csorba moved to Toronto after more than a decade in southern California, they found themselves fascinated with the fact of the semi-detached house – commonplace in Toronto, but an oddity elsewhere. A modest 1907 example in Toronto’s east end became their home and the subject of some wild speculation about what could be done with the type. In the end, the couple – who both worked on complex projects at Morphosis, the firm of Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne – settled on pragmatic changes that achieve a spare and liveable interior.

In particular, the couple removed interior walls to open the space, but a “thickened wall” of cabinetry, as Andrew puts it, extends along one side of the kitchen toward the central stair, incorporating a coat closet and other storage into one unified slab. Stacking it all together against the party wall in closed cabinets serves the extra purpose of insulating the house against noise from its neighbour. “We even have a coat closet and a shoe closet in there,” Andrew says. “To get all those things out of the very small living area makes it feel much larger.”

Otherwise, the pair focused on the classic smallspace problems of light and a sense of openness. Openriser stairs bring sunlight through the interior “and that, combined with the glass partition, makes the house feel as large as it possibly can,” says Andrew. For similar reasons, the ceiling is painted with an eggshell finish, and the black tile around the living-room fireplace has reflective qualities.

Clarifying the details helps create a sense of spaciousness and repose. The glass along the stair runs floor to ceiling, without any hardware in the middle to interrupt it. They couple, who did the finish construction themselves, also smoothed out the floor, designing air vents to match and sit flush with the hardwood. But the most important move, Andrew argues, was containing everyday objects. “There’s always a hidden reality in any modernist project: Where do you put all the stuff that we, as North Americans, live with?” Andrew says. “In our other projects, we’ve incorporated a lot of storage to clean the place up.”

(Photos courtesy of Batay-Csorba)

Softwood landing

A married pair of B.C. architects transform a former butcher shop and grocery store into a woodsy modernist enclave. ‘We will live here forever,’ says Susan Scott, who transformed the space with her husband, David

There’s nothing more British Columbian than living in a home surrounded by woods. David and Susan Scott manage to pull this off in East Vancouver – where the lower level of their residence and studio features walls, floor and ceiling wrapped in oneand- a-quarter inch planks of Douglas fir. “We had a vision of living inside a wood tube,” Susan Scott says. The couple worked directly with a sawyer to select and cut three logs specifically for their place.

In this way, the couple, who launched their architecture firm Scott and Scott in 2013, paid tribute to the region’s rich resource of softwood and also the local modernist tradition, which has built on the beauty of wood both as a structural and as a finishing material. Their starting point was a former butcher shop and grocery store, built in 1911, which had an apartment above. “It has always been built by its owners,” David Scott says, “and there are quirky details to how it was constructed: There were old Coke signs that had been bent into flashing, for example. Taking it apart was a neat process.”

The Scotts put it back together with great care, testing their design details while doing some of the construction with their own hands. The main floor, which is complete, is carefully composed using three materials: concrete, warm-hued Douglas fir finished in beeswax and black-stained fir plywood. The black timber defines a threshold at the front and storage compartments at the back, providing a contrast and also a visual frame for the space.

The Scotts also designed a pair of work tables with leather tops and galvanized-steel legs. These facilitate design work as well as homework and also fun: The downstairs space provides room for their two daughters “to ride bikes or scooters,” David Scott says, “a lot like a basement rec room.” The intermingling of work and home life is something the couple values highly and it also informs their approach to materials and details: They appreciate the value of a patina, and hope that their architecture will improve with time. “We will live here forever,” Susan Scott says, “and it will grow with us.”

(Photos by Janis Nicolay for The Globe and Mail)

A careful balance

To remake a 19th-century Toronto cottage into a home she could call her own, Toronto architect Kirsty Bruce was both ruthless and respectful, maintaining the original floor plans but injecting bold touches

Looking for her first home, Kirsty Bruce found the ideal target for a renovation project: a tiny 1870s cottage in a downtown Toronto laneway. As she recalls, ir was “a ruin,” leaky, sagging – and the least expensive house in the area. To remake it, Bruce applied her experience restoring heritage buildings and also designing modernist spaces.

Today, the interior features a quiet, Scandinavianinfluenced mix of modernist classics – including a few George Nelson Bubble Lamps – with grey paint and lime-washed wide-plank oak floors. In the kitchen, IKEA cabinets sit alongside custom woodwork, including an array mounted artfully in the middle of the wall. This avoids the challenge of lining up cabinets against antique walls: “In an old house,” she says with a laugh, “you can’t count on anything being straight.”

In her new/old house, Bruce, who now leads the firm Bruce Studio with fellow architect Jordan Winters, thoughtfully blends restoration techniques with contemporary touches. She replaced the old, doublehung windows on the front facade, for example, with similar ones in black, but, for the front door, chose a boldly modern unit from Bauhaus Windows that is framed in sapele wood. “It’s a careful balance,” she says, “making the restored part more muted and letting the modern parts sing.”

Maintaining that balance meant leaving most of the walls in place. “I don’t believe in a pure open plan,” says Bruce. Instead, she favours “cellular spaces,” as she puts it, rooms that interconnect but have walls between them. “I like niches and nooks; that feels more like a home to me.” Her house has a living room, a separate dining room and, linked by a corridor, an expanded kitchen at the back. This configuration allows each of the spaces, though small, to have workable layouts. It’s a lesson, Bruce says, that she has carried forward into recreating other houses with similar proportions. (Another key to the small, narrow house: a vestibule at the front door, with custom-made cabinets and shelves in walnut mounted on the wall.)

While the builders were reconstructing her house, Bruce specified that one of its original studs – a true four-by-four made of spruce – be left exposed right in the front hallway. “The layers of the house are revealed here,” she explains. And beautifully so.

(Photos by Stacey Brandford for The Globe and Mail)