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Homeowners keen on renovation are always thrilled to find the perfect designer, someone who readily understands how to realize their vision. But it is equally gratifying for professionals when they get a chance to work with the ideal client.

Such was the case when Susan Wilson and Donald Evans hired Mary Tremain and Andrea Mantin of Plant Architect Inc. to create outdoor spaces that would blend seamlessly with the renovation they had completed on their Markham Street home in Toronto.

“We do a lot of very contemporary architectural work,” says Ms. Tremain, a partner in the firm. “They were enlightened clients … very adventurous and educated about design.”

All photos by Peter Legris

Ms. Wilson is a graphic designer and Mr. Evans is an artist and former owner of a mechanical contracting shop involved with sheet metal fabrication. “Don knows all about materials,” Ms. Tremain adds. “He’s interested in how things are made and how things come together.”

The couple bought the home, located north of Queen Street West, where Trinity Bellwoods meets Chinatown, in 2007. When it came time to renovate the traditional Tudor, built in 1939, they hired architect Paul Syme to transform the inside into an open, modern space. The outside was also dramatically altered. Gone were the gables and front porch, replaced with a flat roof and a simple awning. The brick was stained a dark grey and large windows were framed in solid Spanish cedar.

“Modern, clean, elegant, but inviting,” is how Ms. Wilson describes the look they wanted to achieve.

After such a radical transformation, a traditional front yard of green grass and flower beds certainly wouldn't do. One thing that would remain, however, was the Ailantus tree, commonly referred to as a Tree of Heaven or Chinese sumac. No one (least of all the arborists at the City of Toronto) wanted it removed, so it became a focal point to work with.

The front yard was elevated by building up the soil and the Ailantus was surrounded on two sides by weathering steel, an alloy created for outside use that develops a rusty patina, which protects it from further corrosion. Planks of the same material, of the type commonly used for bridges, were employed to form a walkway from the sidewalk to the front door. The walkway, was built on steel beams, constructed to provide ample room for root growth underneath. A multistem birch, surrounded by a weathering steel planter, was added as a counterpoint to the towering tree.

The walkway was flanked by concrete walls, board-formed to add the texture of wood grain and acid-washed to provide a creamy tone. A sculpture pad, a space for Don to install rotating displays of his artwork, was added to this mix of pleasing textures. One day this spring, the pad supported three perfectly placed cubes made of plate steel, one covered in mirrors.

From the street, the overall effect seems not just modern but somewhat industrial when compared with the traditional homes of the neighbourhood. But that’s not how Ms. Wilson describes it – perhaps because the couple’s previous home was a renovated factory.

“I don't think of it as particularly industrial, not after our first place,” she says. “We originally looked for an industrial building, but there was none left in the area in which we wanted to live, so we decided a house would be fine,” she said. The spacious garage of this new house had, however, once been a soda pop factory and was one of the things that attracted her and Don to the property.

Ms. Mantin, the landscape designer, made a conscious effort to develop a scheme of plantings that would at once complement and soften the rugged materials.

“We intentionally added a sculptural, curvilinear aspect to the planting as a contrast to the rectilinear quality of the walls,” she says. “It’s a modern take on an old European style of gardening where a layered look is created by using sculptural element of hedges. But we wanted to take it in a modernist direction that would be more in relationship to the building.”

Sedum and spurge were planted as ground cover nearest the front, with rows of taller grasses, ferns and sculpted hedges coming up behind for an undulating, modulated effect.

“The intention of it is to be quite full, with a different layers and different textures,” Ms. Mantin says. “And we added the evergreens so that in the wintertime it will still have form.”

The topiary effect of the sculpted bushes was suggested by Ms. Wilson after she fell in love with the gardens at the Château de Marqueyssac in the Dordogne region of France, with its thousands of boxwoods carved into imaginative shapes. Another influence was the “green architecture” of the Belgian landscape designer Jacques Wirtz, known for his work in the Tuileries Garden in Paris.

Materials used in the backyard, which is completely enclosed to resemble a courtyard, were also intended to be in sync with the outside of the house. A deck was added to provide a seating area opening from tall glass doors and a brick with high iron content that creates an interesting patina was chosen for the patio. The landscaping in the back – after it matures – is intended to have the same full, layered, undulating effect that was designed for the front.

An eye-catching material lines the fence separating the yard from the neighbour’s property. Called expanded metal mesh, and sometimes used as fencing or as cladding in commercial projects, it is manufactured by making repetitive cuts in sheet metal and then stretching the metal to create a three-dimensional open-weave effect. The plan is to cover the mesh with creeping vines.

And as for the converted soda pop factory, a wall of which provides the back boundary of the garden, there’s a plan for it, too. Envisioned is an espalier-style fruit tree, perhaps a pear, clinging to its side.

There’s been no shortage of imagination in the redo of this house on Markham Street.

“This is the ideal, that the inside and the outside of the house will be integrated,” Ms. Tremain says. “But it doesn’t always happen this way.”