The success of a residential renovation often depends on everyone's knowing when to stop. Architects, builders, clients - the good ones understand when to quit trying to force an old residence to become something it really doesn't want to, and how to move with the grain of both the streetscape and the house layout to pleasing effect.
I saw an overhaul in historic Leaside last week that has been done with this kind of artistic restraint and commonsensical urbanism. Designed by Toronto architect Cindy Rendely, the work brings a modern lift to a traditional suburban street without violating the long-established rhythm of houses up and down the block.
The house on Donegall Drive began its career, probably some 90 years ago, as a two-storey, two-bedroom family dwelling with a small, becolumned front porch and a three-sided bay window. In common with all the other houses on the street, the front façade was capped by a pitched roof. Ms. Rendely wisely kept the roofline intact in her intervention (thus reinforcing the streetscape) and even extended it at the rear to cover a two-storey extension of the interior volume.
Gone, however, are the porch and bay window. In place of the romantic veranda, there is now a flat slab supported by simple posts. And replacing the window frame is a box made of Corten steel, an industrial alloy whose surface is engineered to weather down to a reddish-brown rust. Ms. Rendely's modernist, spare treatment freshens up the façade while refraining from making it look very different from its neighbours: The Corten at the front, especially, blends well with the original brick fabric and the robust character of the little building.
Corten steel makes another appearance at the rear of the house, where expanses of the stuff frame the large windows and doors that open from the sunken living room toward a deck and paved terrace. This back façade has more formal and material richness than what we find round at the front. In addition to the weathering metal, it features much glass in windows and doors, and also in the enclosure of the balcony off the master bedroom, on the second level. For whatever reason, most unrenovated Toronto houses built before the 1950s are blocked up at the rear, and usually devoid of all but the stingiest windows. Ms. Rendely has kicked out the walls and replaced them with glass, a move that strongly links interior and exterior, and that creates a highly attractive architectural backdrop for the family's hours in the garden.
The inside space of the house has been broadened and brightened by the 15-foot addition at the rear (which contains the living room below, the master bedroom suite above), and by the establishment of a clear view from the front door to the back wall of the terrace. Interior walls have been eliminated, and the whole downstairs plan given a graceful sweep from the dining room behind the front window, through the handsome kitchen (with its beautiful Jerusalem limestone countertops), to the light-filled living room in the back.
I do have one problem with this project, having to do with the super-abundance and variety of finishes, not all of which match up well with each other. In the master bedroom, for example, the stained oak floors do not harmonize with the cherry cabinetry. And in both the living room and master bedroom, the exposed brick walls clash, in terms of both colour and texture, with the stacked slate fireplace surrounds.
So it goes throughout the house. It's as though every available deluxe material somehow had to be used in outfitting the interior, but without sufficient regard for how the whole ensemble would hang together. A reduced material palette, of the kind Ms. Rendely has successfully deployed in other residential designs I have reviewed in this column, would have been more appropriate for a house of this one's small size and modest bearing.
Apart from this caveat, I take no issue with what Cindy Rendely has completed in a neighbourhood threatened by the blight of monster homes. That threat is real, and thoughtful renovations offer real alternatives. We are reminded here, for instance, that one need not demolish a sturdy family house, which has done its duty for most of a century, and put a gargantuan new palazzo in its place in order to obtain gracious living space suitable for a large family. (Six people are living full-time or part-time in the Donegall Drive house.)
Of monster homes, I suppose, there is no end in sight. But this renovation offers several good examples of the creative things that can be done with the elderly buildings in our midst.