MODERN ARCHITECTURE

Once a duplex, now reborn

What started as the addition of a bedroom to welcome a third child named victoria quickly became the expansion, and complete transformation, of a single-family home in Rosemont—la Petite-patrie.

The project, which included the addition of a volume on the building's back façade — Victoria's bedroom — as well as the creation of a new basement, a staircase in the heart of the house and a balcony on the building's front façade, earned a prize at the 13th edition of the Grands Prix du Design for a residential space from 1,600 to 3,200 square feet.

What commanded the jury's attention, among other things, was how colour — namely, sage green — distinguished the new structural architectural elements of the house from the old ones.

“To begin with, colour is something we as an office love to work with when we have the chance to. For young families with young kids, we think it's even more appropriate to play with colour,” said Stéphane Rasselet, the architect behind the project as well as one of two founding architects of Nature Humaine. “The green is actually a theme throughout the house; there's a touch of it on the new balcony street-side, the staircase, and the exterior wall of Victoria's bedroom, on the garden side.

“For a young family with young kids, where there's a lot of energy and things going on in the house, it's a colour that promotes tranquillity and calm. It's known by psychologists to have this effect on people: a feeling of well-being. Green invokes calmness, tranquillity, serenity, and so on.”

With everything that's going on in the world these days, and the amount of time the family is now spending indoors, the colour was a perfect choice.

Before it was a single-family home, Victoria residence was a duplex, one of the reasons why it was so dark.

“The way these buildings were originally built is they had a window in front and a window in back, but the core was pretty dark. One of the objectives was to bring a lot of natural light within the centre of the house,” said Rasselet.

“With that in mind, we opened up a two-storey space in the middle, within which we had a new staircase built. Above that double-height space, we also had a big skylight installed, which is around eight by eight feet, that floods the centre of the house as well as the bathrooms upstairs with light.”

In addition to providing much needed natural light, the skylight also provides changing light conditions during the day, which makes the green vary in shade along with them.

“With the treatment of the staircase, which is all in steel and painted light green, there's a continuity onto the floor, in the area where the kids play on the ground floor. It's close to the kitchen and the dining room, so the parents can always have an eye on them,” Rasselet said.

“Part of the floor was also made with glass — a strip of transparent glass — to bring even more light into the basement, where the kids will eventually play, when they get a little older.”

To contrast with the bright colour and its smooth treatment and infuse the space with natural materials and textures, the surrounding palette is deliberately sober. The living room's structural beams were left exposed, and stained the same shade as the wooden floor, while part of the house's common attached wall was also exposed, and painted white.

“We stripped away part of the wall where there was plaster and Gyproc and exposed part of the original wood structure. It was painted white for more reflection of natural light in that space,” said Rasselet.

“We worked with the contrast, or the duality, between the roughness of some of the materials, like the fibre cement panels, and the delicacy of others, like the stairs, for example.”

Finally, to help with the continuity between the indoor and outdoor spaces — other than using the home's emblematic colour, sage green, and fibre cement panels in both areas — large glass doors were used between the home's dining room and kitchen and its outdoor wooden deck, which is followed by a few steps that lead into what will eventually become a garden.

ADRIEN WILLIAMS PHOTOS, COURTESY OF NATURE HUMAINE A touch of green on the new balcony of this single-family home in Rosemont—la Petite-patrie offers a taste of the colour that plays a recurring role throughout the renovated residential space, differentiating the new structural elements from the old.

In its original iteration as a duplex, the home was quite dark. In the renovation, bringing in plenty of light was a key objective so a large skylight was created above the two-storey central space that contained a distinctive steel staircase painted green. The floor area where the homeowners' children play is also painted green, and includes a portion made of glass that lets even more light into the basement, where the kids will likely play when they're older.

A rear view of the renovated single-family home in Rosemont—la Petite-patrie that started out as a duplex. What began as an expansion to accommodate the arrival of a third child, Victoria, turned into an all-encompassing facelift that resulted in a large, modern interior. The colour green plays a recurring role, including on the exterior wall of Victoria's room.

Part of the house's common attached wall was stripped down to the original wood and painted white, as seen in this upstairs bathroom. Bright yellow tiles surrounding the tub provide a dramatic pop of colour in the otherwise white room. A window admits natural light from the home's large skylight above a two-storey central space.

ADRIEN WILLIAMS PHOTOS, COURTESY OF NATURE HUMAINE A distinctive green staircase links the basement, ground floor and second storey living spaces. On the ground floor, a contemporary kitchen leads to the dining room, which is separated by large glass doors from an outdoor deck at the back of the house.