AN ARCHITECT’S ANGLE
Spend big on exterior materials, save on interior furnishings
One minute your baby’s the size of a baguette in a bassinette, the next he’s littering the house with Lego and doing marathon sprints through the rooms. Then his sister arrives and follows suit and suddenly life feels claustrophobic and you can’t stand it any longer: You are experi- encing the incredible-shrinking- home; a phenomenon that is familiar to parents of rapidly growing children.
Three years ago, Jennifer and Andrew Scholes found themselves in such a predicament. The couple — she’s an architect, he’s a businessman — was living in a house on a narrow lot off Jane Street with their son and daughter, now 13 and 10 respectively.
“The house was not only too small for four,” says Jennifer Scholes who runs an eponymous architectural firm, “but my street was being used as a bypass for a three- way light, so it wasn’t the safest.”
Thus began a three- year hunt for a detached home with “more lateral space,” says Scholes. A dearth of large houses in their price range however meant pickings were slim. Then one day their real estate agent alerted them to a house in an affluent area they had never considered: Humber Valley Village.
The secluded west- end neighbourhood, whose boundaries extend east of Islington Avenue and north of Dundas Street West, was a mysterious hinterland. “We actually didn’t know it existed,” Scholes says. “There is no real thoroughfare, so you would never chance upon by driving through it.”
Like anyone coming to Humber Valley Village for the first time, Scholes was surprised to find it flaunted the best parts of the suburbs (vast lots, green space, wide streets). Plus, the family-oriented area wasn’t too isolated from city life — the Junction, with its lively Dundas Street West strip of cafés and restaurants, is minutes away by car.
But mostly it was the undulating topography that gripped her. “It’s such a hidden gem. It’s a ’50s- style suburb nestled on the river valley with rolling hills that is surrounded by golf courses (five in total),” Scholes says.
As luck would have it, the house her agent found was on a pie- shaped lot with magnificent possibilities: The big backyard boasted a reverse ravine — meaning the land out back sloped upwards — and a pendulum of tree branches draped over the house in captivating arcs.
But the house itself was nothing special. “It was a two-storey ranchstyle developer job with a breezeway and single-car garage and there was no access to the backyard,” Scholes recalls.
Inside wasn’t much better: the layout was choppy and the flow was bad. Nevertheless, the couple bought it, living there for three years with the plan to build an addition. But that idea was scrapped after it was discovered the house had a major water issue.
“Because we’re at the base of a hill, the water table is quite high,” Scholes says, which meant the family often came home to the beginnings of an indoor swimming pool. The breaking point came when the bathtub started to leak and it essentially rained on the family’s mashed potatoes at dinner one night.
So the ranch got the boot and Scholes set to work designing a fourbedroom dream house, which would be built over a year by Ryan Johnson and Nick Poissant of Arthur Ross Project Management. “They worked so efficiently and tidily and they were organized,” she enthuses, noting the project was very much a joint effort.
To make best use of the pie- shaped l ot, Scholes created an exquisite 3,600- square- foot angled house ( not too big, so it gracefully fits into the neighbourhood) that seemingly hugs the front of the lot. At a glance the house looks like two separate buildings ( or “volumes,” as she describes them in architectspeak) joined by a tucked-in entrance.
On the garage half, Scholes chose beguiling black brick and on the other aluminum panels, whose ridged divisions are texturally striking. (“They are the same metal cladding used on gas stations and McDonald’s restaurants,” she says.) For a finishing note, a zinc canopy held up by three stainless steel columns runs along the front of the garage, its three window surrounds, or “fins” as she calls them, are also detailed in stainless steel. The Douglas fir windows from Loewen dictated all the wood choices inside the home.
The components weren’t cheap, Scholes ackowledges, but recommends splurging on exterior materials, so the house looks good and functions well for years to come.
Modern architecture, after all, lends itself to better materials. “Because there’s not a lot of ornamentation, if you want to execute it successfully the materials have to be better quality and have interest,” she says.
And never fake it out front, meaning don’t use stone on the façade and stucco on the sides. It’s like the woman in the fantastic dress at the cocktail party that turns around and exposes a bad seam or an old bra strap.
“I feel very strongly that the cladding on a house should be the same on the front as it is on the back,” Scholes emphasizes. “A lot of these houses have a stone façade and you turn the corner and a foot later it becomes stucco.” ( Though she’s no stucco snob and says it can be beautiful as long as you’re being honest about it by carrying it through to the rear.)
A sense of authenticity is, in fact, one of the reasons this house is also a knockout inside. Who needs excessive decoration when you’ve got a sunlight-splashed interior and extra-large windows and doors that frame a gorgeous ravine? ( There’s nothing more real than that.) Not just meant for marvelling, Scholes designed it so that five doors off the main floor offer easy access to the outdoors. The real- overphony aesthetic continues in the floors and kitchen, done in Douglas fir that’s been oiled to let the simple beauty of the wood shine.
Another wonderful feature on the main floor is a catwalk and sculptural stairwell that cast the eye upwards, making the house feel huge. It is a bit of trickery, Scholes admits, because the living space on the main floor only has a nine- foot ceiling ( extra- large doors do deceive) and it is only 1,500 square feet ( that dratted double- car garage gobbles up a lot of space).
But Scholes is not complaining: Going from an incredible- shrinking home to an incredible- expanding home is nothing to pooh-pooh at.
IT WAS A TWO-STOREY RANCH STYLE DEVELOPER JOB [IN A 50S-STYLE SUBURB] WITH A BREEZEWAY AND SINGLE- CAR GARAGE AND THERE WAS NO ACCESS TO THE BACKYARD. — JENNIFER SCHOLES, HOMEOWNER AND ARCHITECT
SPLURGE ON THE EXTERIOR SO IT LOOKS GOOD FOR A LONG TIME