Ideas of transparency and connection are explored in a house that blends old and new. An existing two storey house – renovated to include a third floor – is combined with a two storey contemporary addition that modestly integrates itself into the fabric of the neighbourhood. Visual and spatial connections travel three dimensionally, offering changing views and sensorial experiences as the occupant moves throughout the home.

The focal point of the residence is an uninterrupted flight of stairs spanning three stories. Ushering occupants to the third floor office and rooftop patio, the stairs are anchored around a three storey wooden insert that begins in the basement and stretches just shy of the roof.  An ascending flock of laser cut swallows helps to draw the eye upward, past all three storeys, through a large skylight at the top of the stairs and into the sky beyond. The use of modern materials – steel, wood, and glass for the stairs – helps act as a natural counterpoint to the textured brick dividing wall.

Similar connections between spaces occur in many areas throughout the home: A wooden slat wall immediately upon entry offers framed glimpses of the rooms beyond. A short passageway lined with illuminated ceiling panels helps to demarcate the division between the existing house and the new addition. A planter on the back deck continues through the exterior wall and into the kitchen, creating programmatic continuity between outside and in. A series of linear lighting features running throughout various spaces provide ambience while bridging rooms together. Custom millwork in the master ensuite begins as a vanity before wrapping down to terminate in a shower bench. These examples, among others, ensure a graceful path through the residence that still provides for unexpected moments of discovery.

This project is scheduled to be completed in the Fall of 2011.

On historic Palmerston Avenue, the interior of an old Victorian house has been re-imagined for the contemporary family. The interventions made in the home are uncompromisingly modern, yet still warm and compatible with its residents child-centric lives. The cheerful clutter of toys in the space doesn’t detract from our work, rather they complement each other, proving that modern design and family living need not be exclusive.

As the house has a very open plan, our work traces throughout the ground floor and helps to delineate different areas. Just inside the entrance foyer is a free-floating storage unit for coats and keys. The materials used here – a base of walnut wrapped by a band of white lacquered MDF – are the primary material choices for the home. Their deployment throughout the ground floor helps to unify the spaces and ensure a continuous and graceful flow from area to area.

Opposite of the storage unit is a built-in bench that serves as both a place to untie one’s shoes, and a seat for the main living space. This area is defined by a floor to ceiling wall of cabinetry - a strongly asymmetrical arrangement of open and closed storage, grounded by a built-in hearth. A wonderful cross section of the family’s interests exist here, some put on display, others neatly tucked away. From books to photos to children’s toys, the cabinet is an evolving hub of life in the home.

The materiality of the kitchen is integral with the rest of the house, but also defines itself with the addition of two new materials. White countertops wrap throughout the kitchen and a row of walnut uppers both provide a pop of colour and complement the other areas. The rest of the cabinetry is made of grey lacquered MDF and topped by laser-cut openings that provide for recessed lighting to shine through. The subdued colour palette of the kitchen allows for the living area to rightfully take centre stage.

Credits:

Photography: Andrew Snow

Terraplan Landscape Architects owns a building which is a comfortable size and in a good location, but the building shows its industrial roots, and doesn’t reflect Terraplan’s design ambitions.  We have a long-standing relationship with Terraplan:  They have consulted with us on some of our projects, and we have worked with their team as well.  So we were pleased to be asked to design a new exterior façade for their building as well as renovations for their  offices.  The interior design and construction is ongoing, but the façade is now complete.  We replaced the painted brick and aluminum cladding with a cedar band interrupted by a stucco finish around doors and windows. As the natural approach to the building was along its length, we created an entrance awning oriented in the same direction.  The existing retail style front door and windows were replaced with an entrance more appropriate for a design office.  Terraplan now has a comfortable, inviting entry way which impresses and inspires both clients and staff.

Project Credits:

Structural Engineer:  Blackwell Bowick Structural Engineers

General Contractor:  AJD Construction Group Inc.

Our client collects and displays contemporary art throughout their home.  Their house is relatively new, and its overall size and individual spaces are quite expansive, making it ideal for displaying art.  However, it was built in a very traditional style that was not to our client’s taste, nor did it complement the art.  We have been transforming the house a room at a time to make it a place that serves as both art gallery and home.

When planning our interventions in this home, the goal is always to find connections between the spaces that display art and its surroundings, with the use of millwork, wall recesses, projections, and even lighting.  The master bath was completely transformed, with a new floating vanity, and concrete flooring and countertop.  Fixed louvers offer privacy for the bathtub, but also diffuse natural light from the windows.  For the kitchen, we replaced all of the surface finishes, and created a light box band that surrounds the space.  Elsewhere books, photographs, and other personal objects are displayed with care and purpose in custom cabinetry.  Even the choice of a paint colour on a wall creates a vivid place for the display of art.  Throughout the house we worked with the owners on choosing a mixture of classic modern and contemporary furniture in keeping with their surroundings.  For the outside of the house, we have designed new window privacy screens as well as a front entrance awning.  The small openings create an intricate floral pattern that are interesting in themselves, but also cast shadows both inside and outside the house.

Credits:

Base construction and interior finishes:  SGR Management
Millwork:  Patina FC
Metal window screens and doorway awning:  PD Lab
Landscape in collaboration with: Terraplan Landscape Architects
Photography: Andrew Snow, Jeremy Vandermeij  & Geoffrey Wiebe

With Harold Madi.

The opportunity to redesign a landmark restaurant in an established, but rapidly changing neighbourhood brings a distinctive set of possibilities and problems.  King Street West is an old neighbourhood that has been through a recent and extensive transformation.  Innocenti was a restaurant that had occupied an important corner of the neighbourhood for over twenty years.  The restaurant and its owner had become a fixture in the neighbourhood, offering affordable but warm food and atmosphere.  Despite this the restaurant hadn’t kept up with the dynamic changes around it.  The new owners had a vision for the restaurant that kept the old warm neighbourhood feel while at the same time providing a flexible and beautiful space that fit the new design-savvy residents of King West.  The restaurant needed to engage the street to truly connect it to the neighbourhood.  It needed to connect its own disparate parts, and come together as a unified space. And it needed to do this while maintaining a flexible interior that facilitated café dining, cocktail hour drinks, and more formal lunches and dinners. The new name for the restaurant underlines this connection:  KiWe (short for King Street West) clearly pronounces its connection to the neighbourhood of which it is a part.  The design for this space became about connections: to the neighbourhood, between the parts of the building, and perhaps most importantly to its patrons.

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Our client recently purchased a newer home that was large and well-built but not in keeping with their open-concept, modern, style.  We used a relatively small but striking palette of materials throughout the ground floor of the home to demarcate the function of each space.  Large, formal gestures such as lighted alcoves and lowered ceiling planes provide the visual cues that connect the different spaces.

Project Credits:

Photography: Jeremy Vandermeij
Millwork:  Lee Custom Millwork

The Montrose house represented Roundabout’s first design/build project. The previous owner had lived in the house for 50 years, and substantial updates were required throughout.

To achieve a sense of space without loosing the intimacy that made the turn of the century house so inviting to begin with, the main floor was completely opened up, and spaces were more subtly contained with built-in furniture and colour: A peninsula to divide kitchen from dining room; a lowered ceiling at the front entrance to create a sense of entryway and a detailed guard rail for the stairs all formed spaces rather than rooms. Opening up the space, and rebuilding the back of the house to create a more light-filled kitchen all help to create a cohesive main floor space.

Materials choices throughout are warm, overlaid upon a basically contemporary palette. A rich brick pattern of dark brown tiles are interspersed with small, randomly-placed coloured glass blocks in the kitchen backsplash. Similarly, the warm white walls are occasionally broken up with a deep, intense colour. The kitchen cabinetry features glass windows of different sizes which hint at its contents. The peninsula countertop was made from wood reclaimed from the old stud walls of the house. Custom marine grade plywood details are carried throughout the house, everything from the custom closet at the entrance, to the cozy upholstered benches along the stair railings which lead up to the second floor, and through to the custom millwork in the second floor bathroom. These details, while interesting by themselves, also serve to tie together the elements that make a house a home.

Project Credits

Builder for rear extension: Superfly Design Group
Millwork: Seth Coyle
General construction: Andre LePage
Electrical: Syncord Inc.
Photography: Matthew Foley

Winning entry for a public art competition sponsored by IKEA Canada and the City of Etobicoke.

Roundabout Studio’s Daniel Harland, with Frances Hahn and Marcin Sztaba

Once only a source for furniture, landscape here is inspired by a chair, a table, and a bed. By using furniture as a starting point, a series of sculptural installations set into the landscape suggest a new relationship to nature: a river’s edge, a field, a forest and a clearing within it, are uncovered by a plough, one way furniture can give back to our Ontario landscape.

]]> http://roundaboutstudio.com/%e2%80%98a-furnished-landscape/feed 0 http://roundaboutstudio.com/dunblaine-avenue http://roundaboutstudio.com/dunblaine-avenue#comments Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:55:41 +0000 admin1 http://roundaboutstudio.com/wp/?p=158

Our client was a married couple whose children have grown and left home.  At this point in their lives it was not necessary to have a green lawn with a perimeter garden, so we proposed to landscape the entire backyard.  The deck is on three levels:  One is for barbecuing and casual drinks, another is a large dining deck, and the third is a smaller, private reading dock.  The relationship between the massing of the soft landscaping and the angle of the decks is such that each deck offers contrasting views of the garden.

Credits:

Decks:  Seth Coyle and Andrew Blackwood
Plantings and soft pathways:  Greenery Unlimited
Photography: Richard Lautens

Our client owns a home in Leaside that is charming in both its detailing and relatively modest scale.  We believed it was important to respect the warmth and comfort inherit in the house, and apply careful and appropriate interventions. The kitchen is designed to seamlessly integrate with the traditional detailing of the ground floor, and yet have the amenities and open concept feel of modern kitchens that the client desired.  We were also asked to incorporate both a media room and guest bedroom in the basement.  We needed to accommodate multiple functions in a relatively small space, with intelligent use of multi-purpose built-ins.  This suggested that we take a more contemporary approach in the design and choice of finishes for the basement:  A large 6’ sliding door opens to reveal a wet bar, a Murphy bed is concealed in a storage cabinet, and custom couches and ottomans also serve as additional storage space.   We also underpinned the basement in order to provide 8’ clearance throughout.

Project Credits:

Furniture: Mieda Design Inc.
Millwork:  Patina FC
Photography: Jeremy Vandermeij

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