Montreal home a ray of sunshine
Extensive renovation adds bright yellow staircase to re-energize 1930s-era space
Like a sudden ray of sunshine, the staircase of Canari House beams through the Montreal home like a dose of instant happiness.
It brings “a lot of life and cheerfulness to a space,” says owner AnneChristine Lajoie.
The owners of Canari House, Lajoie and Oliver Gauthier, hired architects at Montreal architecture firm Naturehumaine to convert the 1930s-era fourplex into a home for themselves plus a rental unit. On the first floor is an office and a small gym that opens to a small yard. The second floor has two bedrooms, kitchen, living and dining room — plus a glass floor beneath the dining and living rooms that helps illuminate the gym below. There’s direct access to a private terrace from the dining room, built above the new one-car garage.
And running from top to bottom is the brilliant yellow staircase, the central focal point of the home. A band of black also runs through the house, while bathrooms are orange and blue and the rest of the decor is in neutral tones.
At 4,450 square feet, Canari House cost $900,000 to renovate. Sustainability was considered with the conservation of most of the house’s original wood structure, and windows are double glazed with argon. The house took 16 months to design and build and was completed in the summer of 2016.
Stéphane Rasselet, principle architect with Naturehumaine, answers a few questions about Canari House: What inspired your design?
We wanted to create a very graphic gesture, strong in contrast . . . it became evident we needed to create a central axis through the centre of the house from front to back, thus linking both the main entrance to the access of the roof terrace. This became the central spine of the project, which we then decided to treat as a strong graphic element by highlighting it in black on the floor and ceiling. Adding to this, a central staircase painted in yellow created a powerful visual effect throughout the house. Black and yellow, according to colour specialists, is the strongest visual contrast the human eye can perceive. There was also a wish to keep all other elements such as the kitchen and built-in furniture in the living room, more subdued, in tones of white and light grey. Why blue and orange bathrooms?
The clients, being a young family, wanted to have a touch of playfulness in the house. I have to admit it’s also an aspect of Naturehumaine’s work to experiment with colour in general — obviously when the clients are open to it. The colours blue and orange were selected in this case mostly because we found that the ceramic tiles corresponding to these colours were the most esthetically pleasing.