Big city living, tiny little home
Space is not a final frontier for architecture enthusiast keen to make more of less
Jason Ho likes a challenge. Especially when it comes in small packages. While most people buy up — increasing size as they go — the 32-year-old health-care facility designer buys down.
Ho started with a shared apartment during his undergrad days, then purchased a tiny downtown condo while doing his Masters in architecture. He’s now graduated to the 600-sq.-ft. lower level of a Leslieville townhome he purchased. But he already has plans for his next move: A 400-sq.-ft. renovated garden shed.
“I find tiny more comfortable,” Ho says. “It’s more manageable, easier to keep clean and, if designed well, has everything I need.
“For every architecture enthusiast, the aspiration is to manipulate spaces and see what they can do, and build it yourself.”
His favourite area is a really tiny office at the front of his floor of the townhouse, all 75 square feet of it, where he thumbs through design books and magazines, does his online searches and drafts floor plans. His two rescue cats — Gogo and Yoko — usually hang out there, too. A chair and side table accommodate clients or friends and, sometimes, he’ll even put down a yoga mat.
“It’s a good place to get away from the chaos in my life,” says Ho, who’s busy managing the properties he owns and rents out, and working on contract for an architecture firm.
His desk was templated to fit snugly under the bay window. Within reach is a vast collection of books. “I like to sketch and read, I have a book collection, I’m kind of a hoarder of books,” he says.
Sitting down, Ho is at eye level with the sidewalk. The window is fitted with frosted film for privacy, but can be opened for a view of the park across the street or people watching on the sidewalk.
The cats are always there too, crowded in on his lap — or on the laptop.
“My friends who aren’t cat fans think this is highly dysfunctional,” he says, of the felines.“But we like it. It’s bright and connected to the street activity, to a bigger world. It’s warm, sunny . . . maybe I’m a cat, too.”
He’s separated his little oasis from the bedroom, bathroom and closet area by using acrylic panels, siliconed to the cement floor by steel pipes, and hand-sanded.
“Small spaces force you to be more organized,” Ho says. Although he often works on large-scale health-care projects, he prefers small-space projects such as those he does for friends and family who are likewise intrigued by small space living.
“I think a lot about how a person can live well in a very small space. Having lived in so many myself, I’ve learned that to make it work there needs to be some connection to the outdoors,” he says.
That prerequisite is easily satisfied by the back garden that’s an extension to his living space: small, lush and visible from the sliding glass doors along his home’s back wall. Stairs from a small patio lead up to a courtyard filled with trees, bushes and flowering plants that provide winter interest and summer colour.
Ho has brought nature inside, too — fresh flowers are a must and he’s created a natural landscape sculpture with backlit birch trunks. “Since the bulkheads were there to stay, I decided to somewhat conceal them with a nature-scape,” he says.
“Birch trees remind me of cottage country, and this serves beauty and function, and creates a little oasis all its own.”
Making his home into a retreat, ironically, includes being able to have friends over. Thanks to a cornucopia of food shopping nearby in Leslieville, Ho has developed a love of cooking. But that’s meant his little kitchen has had to double up as an entertainment area.
The island — made from Ikea cabinets — is on castors so it can move to create extra floor space; the counter of heat-resistant black steel plate has a pullout section that creates more workspace, or a dining table.
Not surprising, Ho is a huge fan of the Tiny House movement.
“Small spaces are the best,” he says, “everything is in close proximity, but they only work if they are part of a larger whole. And they must multitask or you end up with separated functions which really makes the home feel chopped up.”