What is a typical downtown Toronto house?
If you’ve lived in this city for more than five minutes, you know the answer.
It’s elderly, and it’s brick. It stands three storeys tall. On the second level (or sometimes on the first), a glazed paunch or bay window opens toward the sidewalk. Its roof is pitched in line with the fashion current at the time of construction: steeply and narrowly if the house was put up when Gothic was in vogue, broadly and capaciously if it was topped off in the Edwardian era, and so on.
It has a porch and a small garden out front – modest but significant symbolic intervals between domestic space and the street. Neither frivolous nor mean, the house-type commonly encountered in Hogtown districts developed before 1945 speaks of sturdy, industrious values, common sense and respectability.
It’s free of postmodernist affectations such as eccentricity and neurosis and wit – though, to tell the truth, it’s probably a little short on warmth and charm.
Never mind: This legacy from yesteryear’s developers has proven to be physically durable and enduringly popular, and we should thank them for it.
Not that it’s entirely a thing of the past, a phenomenon without consequences for the present. Indeed, local designers of contemporary dwellings meant for traditional downtown streets often riff on the features of the type, updating them (with varying degrees of flair) to appeal to 21st-century urban tastes and sensibilities.
If you would like to see an interesting residential example of the updating I’m talking about, drop by 312 Gladstone Ave. The new, 2,350-square-foot residence at that address, on the market for $1.9-million, is the handiwork of Toronto architect Steven Fong and developer/builder David Yostos (of Y Squared), who told me that it represents “an American interpretation of the Toronto house.” (Both Mr. Fong and Mr. Yostos are from the United States.)
Of course, “American” can mean many things. But on the evidence of what these Yanks have done here, the term recalls attractive modern architectural traditions that are open-handed and democratic, at home with strong, plain materials, and immune to show-off.
Take, for example, the street-side façade. A short, practical flight of concrete steps leads up from the small forward garden to a small porch projecting from a brick Toronto-style face. The second level, which bulges out toward the street in a way reminiscent of a Victorian bay window, is trimmed with light-tinted precast concrete panels, while the glazing on the uppermost storey is framed by dark vertical steel slats. This three-part composition is muscular, but not pushy. Its tall, slender form calls to mind the profiles of old Toronto houses on Gladstone and numerous other avenues, while its material palette is modern and industrial-strength.
In fact, the architect and builder have deliberately sought to give their version of the typical Toronto house a hard-hat touch.
Small plants, workshops, warehouses and such, after all, are scattered throughout the city’s older neighbourhoods, especially on the west side of downtown. While many of these establishments have recently undergone conversion into condo stacks, their exteriors still lend blue-collar accents to gentrified streetscapes. There’s a chocolate factory right across Gladstone from 312. Mr. Fong and Mr. Yostos did a good deed when they decided to let their house’s otherwise genteel façade make a bow, at least in terms of its tough materiality, to the industrial emplacements round about.
But if the exterior of this house looks back over its shoulder to sources and styles from the past, its interior – unlike the intensely divvied-up living space in the traditional Toronto house – is loft-like and uncluttered and pillar-free. The structure has been steel-framed to insure both physical solidity and maximum openness in the layout.
As you might expect in a project tailored for casual contemporary living, the entry level is a clear spatial sweep from the front door and dining area, through the kitchen, to the living-room ensemble at the rear, and beyond it. When the transparent back wall is completely folded away, that is, the interior (which has engineered white-oak flooring) will be joined almost seamlessly to the ample deck, doubling the size of the living room in clement weather.
The three bedrooms and study are on the second and topmost levels, and there is a basement suite, accessible through a entrance separate from the main one. While such arrangements are in keeping with conventional market wisdom, Mr. Fong and Mr. Yostos have introduced elements throughout their scheme that are unconventionally lovely. The handsome staircase, for instance, features steel treads that seem to float effortlessly between the wall and the glass bannister; and the master bathroom has the suavity and spaciousness of one in an upmarket, chic hotel. (When not busy with houses, Mr. Fong designs boutique hotels and clubs.)
This house just north of Little Portugal succeeds architecturally, then, in both its intentions: to carve out of the city an efficient, sensuously engaging space for modern living; and to respond in thoughtful ways to its venerable precedent, the “typical Toronto house.”