Our final design is the epitome of effortless luxury, infused with weightlessness, calm and ease. The finished home features three bedrooms, with 2,000 square feet above grade, a 1,000 square foot finished basement, and a 500 square foot sub basement featuring a theatre and bar. The use of natural materials, a warm palette, beautifully concealed functional design and an innovative application of frameless windows resulted in a home that feels like a rural oasis. Everything is intentional, with no detail left untouched.
A key part of our approach was to infuse the interiors with as much natural sunshine as possible and showcase the vibrant surrounding tree canopy. We accomplished this with Toronto’s first application of frameless windows, imparting a treehouse vibe throughout the space. This was a significant feat of engineering and collaboration, as no one locally had installed these windows before.
The main staircase features origami-thin, folding planes of white oak that appear to float from floor to floor, but are supported by heavy steel framing hidden within the walls. Glass rails are nestled within sleek black steel channels, with similar black steel channels as hand-grips, reinforcing the effortless design.
The same sense of weightlessness can be found in the home’s exterior. The lower portion of the house is wrapped in seamless, perfectly flush Neolith porcelain panels (another feat of collaboration), while the upper floors are clad in a heavier Indiana limestone and cantilevered over the bottom portion. The home seems to defy gravity and imparts a sense of ease and airiness from the moment you see it.
House 95 is full of quiet luxury and feels thoroughly effortless – the most challenging design achievement.
The clients, a retired couple, wanted to downsize and gave us carte blanche to transform their 25-foot wide lot in Toronto’s Bedford Park neighbourhood into their dream home. Achieving this was no easy task, as House 95 came to us with a pre-approved, generic, builder basic design and already-secured building permits that we needed to work within.
The design of the frameless windows minimizes the casings around the glass, resulting in a near-perfect sense that the interiors flow unimpeded to outside. A particularly sublime effect is found around the dining room banquette. A wall of windows wraps a corner, creating an unobstructed view of the outdoors, making the space feel more like an exterior porch.
To complement the light, airy treehouse sensibility, we used white oak engineered hardwood flooring on the ceiling and polished concrete floors, heated from within, to amplify natural light. Receded black marble baseboards make walls appear to float throughout the home.
The exterior features another material innovation: the porcelain panels have been coated with an environmentally-friendly photocatalytic surface treatment that is self cleaning and antimicrobial when it interacts with sunlight – it helps to purify the air around it, as well as helping to lengthen the life of the material.