HAPPINESS IS GOOD INFILL
Six modern homes replace a dilapidated bungalow in Mechanicsville remake
Rhys Phillips takes us to Mechanicsville, where a sensitive development has totally remade a dilapidated block.
Unlike many North American cities, Ottawa largely escaped the hollowing out of its central communities during the period of the great suburban diaspora. Indeed, historic neighbourhoods such as Sandy Hill, the Glebe, the Golden Triangle and Ottawa South even prospered, experiencing increasing home values as many middle- and higherlevel federal mandarins eschewed long commutes for urban living. At the same time, other older workingclass neighbourhoods such as Vanier and Mechanicsville survived, even if plagued at times with petty crime infestations.
Intensification has become the official mantra of city politicians and planners as well as an important business strategy for Ottawa’s mainstream developers. While cranes for mid-rise condominiums dot the skyline and controversy swirls around proposals for 20- and even 40-storey residential towers, many modest infill housing projects, often with a decided modernist bent, are also transforming older neighbourhoods.
One such project now animates the corner of Pinhey and Armstrong streets in Mechanicsville. Four striking stand-alone houses and a back-toback double have been deftly inserted into what was once the 6,000-squarefoot yard for a single house.
Architect Jim Colizza, no stranger to urban infill housing, saw the potential for sensitive intensification when the prow-like corner property came onto the market in 2008. The lot contained a dilapidated one-storey house with no basement and a garage near collapse. An old wooden perimeter fence shielded a pockmarked dirt yard that had been home to a junkyard for years.
Certainly, it lacked curb appeal. So, too, did the neighbourhood’s mix of modest, largely wooden houses interspersed with light industrial properties. But this community of intimately narrow streets and lanes is also next door to the rapidly evolving Wellington Village, arguably Ottawa’s funkiest urban streetscape.
“We wanted to have a little bit of fun designing a cluster of small, playful houses rather than jamming in standard row or stacked townhouses,” says Colizza as he, Anthony Bruni, his partner in Colizza Bruni Architecture, and I sit in the dining room of 129 Armstrong St., its generous windows confidently overlooking the street corner.
Each had to have a bit of its own outdoor space, a parking spot, two bedrooms and a sizable roof terrace as well as a neighbourly engagement with the street. To do so, he continues, “we knew we would need multiple variances in setbacks, parking spot lengths, lot widths and so on.” But no increase in height, always guaranteed to be controversial, was required.
To ensure success, they quickly engaged the Hintonburg Community Association in dialogue about the proposed redevelopment. With a solid core of artists and other creative people who have congregated around Wellington Village, the association is, according to Colizza, the most sophisticated in the city with a willingness to listen first before reacting.
“There is a certain live-and-let-live mentality towards one’s neighbours, an attribute shared with long-term residents, that respects differences but still believes in staying on top of what is going on.”
The lack of intrusive garages, the mainly single-home configuration, as well as the presence of street trees and small but green yards all found favour. With community support, city officials were quick to come onside to make sure the intensification coveted by the urban planners would take place.
To minimize development costs, the property was severed into six lots and sold to individual builderowners that included Nic De Socio, an intern architect in the firm. While Colizza and Bruni provided all the designs and acted as full-service architects to each of the owners during construction, there was room for individual creativity. For example, kitchens and bathrooms as well as decks and fencing were either developed by or designed in collaboration with the architects. The cost of each individualized unit was costed out separately and included a design fee.
The actual building process was very much a co-operative approach. “I would call it the Sault Ste. Marie model,” says Colizza, referencing his hometown, “where everyone is always available to help out on someone else’s project.” Sweat equity came from many of the young owners who acted as their site’s “general labourer” responsible for ongoing cleanups and preparing for transition between trades.
Colizza and Bruni’s core organizing principle is a central scissor stair in white steel and richly hued maple that ascends from the full basement to a small studio space on the third floor. At each level save the top, two rooms — approximately 11- by 12-foot modules — jut out from either side of the stair. It’s a layout that minimizes the circulation space that can disproportionately eat up floor space in so many conventional houses and makes the modest 888- to 1,051-square-foot units seem much larger.
Together the houses form a cluster of simple, albeit exquisitely detailed, boxes of silver-and-black metal arranged into a visually complex and layered tableau. Most nearby homes are small, boxy workman houses with smatterings of grittier industrial metal buildings. “Our houses reflect this history in an abstracted way,” says Bruni.
A bedroom, full bathroom and generous utility room constitute the basement level, kitchen and dining room the ground level and living room, bathroom and bedroom the second floor. A well-glazed studio that opens onto one or two roof terraces tops each unit.
Given the angle of Armstrong, several of the units have trapezoidshaped living and/or dining rooms. In all units, with the exception of the back-facing half of the double, these public rooms confidently confront their respective streets with large, welcoming windows.
Despite the designed layout, says Bruni, there is considerable flexibility in the units and room uses can be flipped, facilitated by having all the mechanics channelled through the central core.
Both architects believe natural light is a given for good residential architecture. Thus the open riser staircase also serves as a “light cannon” teasing sunlight down from the upper studio. (For De Socio, an accomplished painter, the studio serves the function of its name.) At the same time, the stairwell acts as a chimney, evacuating summer heat when windows at the top are opened.
At 123 Armstrong, the secondlevel bedroom-cum-office is an open loft overlooking the kitchen, creating a double-height volume to improve the quantity of natural light and enhance the perception of spaciousness.
Floors are Levelrock (or poured gypsum) that is then finished with clear or coloured epoxy. Embedded in the gypsum is tubing for the water-based radiant heating. Using a very economical boiler the size of a medium-sized suitcase, which also provides domestic hot water, this system avoids space-eating bulkheads.
These “tower houses” neatly combine affordability and sensitive urban intensification with a creative modernism that also resonates with the neighbourhood’s interesting social and physical history.