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
Photography: Jeremy Vandermeij  & Geoffrey Wiebe

The owners of this Rosedale home like to entertain large family gatherings.  However, it was difficult to accommodate 20-plus people comfortably on the ground floor.  But rather than add a large addition out the rear of the house, we found that a careful reorganization of the space and a more open ground floor layout meant that only a small increase in the overall footprint of the house was required.  We are using this more modest addition as an opportunity to create a cohesive rear elevation for the house, and to add a private deck on the second floor.  A glass curtain wall and an open stairwell in the first floor will bring much-needed light to the basement.

Our client is a small family of three, and so we need to create a sense of intimacy once the guests are gone. We’re addressing this by using materials to emphasize the transitions from one open space to another.  Natural stone serves as a kitchen island countertop and also a built-in bench which borders the family room.  A contemporary version of traditional wainscoting makes the family room a cozy and inviting space.  That same wainscoting wraps around millwork leading to the rear entrance area of the house, which includes another built-in bench, cabinetry for coats and boots, and a chalkboard perfect for leaving messages for family members.  It is these transitions which suggest a unified whole, but also demarcates space where walls do not exist.

This project is currently in development, and construction will commence in the spring.

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.

]]> http://roundaboutstudio.com/kiwe-kitchen/feed/ 0 http://roundaboutstudio.com/bannockburn-ave/ http://roundaboutstudio.com/bannockburn-ave/#comments Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:44:34 +0000 admin1 http://roundaboutstudio.com/wp/?p=103

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/design-exchange/ http://roundaboutstudio.com/design-exchange/#comments Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:39:46 +0000 admin1 http://roundaboutstudio.com/wp/?p=361

10th Anniversary Exhibition

We were invited by the Design Exchange to participate in their 10th Anniversary gala and exhibition, which posed the question, ‘Where will we be in ten years?’ Because the pace of immigration will intensify in the coming years, we believe that the City of Toronto will become an even more multicultural place to live. We chose to represent this with an archetypal Toronto house overlaid with text drawn from Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’. The book chronicles an explorer’s stories of fantastical and abstract foreign cities. In the end, the reader discovers that each place is in fact a different version of the same city. In the same way, newcomers will have different experiences of the City of Toronto.

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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