Thornhill, Ont. home of David and Alicia Wexler. Renovation by architect Michael Taylor and Desar Construction Studio.Tom Arban Photography
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
“Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, 1962
Despite the criticism, builders continued to build green ones and pink ones and blue ones, decade after decade. The only difference? They became big boxes of “ticky tacky,” which the Oxford dictionary defines as “inferior or cheap material, especially as used in suburban building.” Meaning stucco and Styrofoam, vinyl windows with fake muntin bars, and an exterior sameness that created a hypnotic, Fred Flintstone-like repeating background.
But, sometimes, aesthetics, architecture and originality have to play second fiddle. Sometimes, a big box is all one can afford. When David and Alicia Wexler were moving to Toronto in 1994 – he’s a Torontonian and she’s a Montrealer – it was a very hot market.
“We were trying to find a place for us and our three children and our very big piano,” Mr. Wexler remembers with a smile. “It didn’t matter where we went, there was a trail of cars following us to put bids on houses.”
So, despite trying to place the family in midtown Toronto, an area with which he was familiar, the Wexlers chose Thornhill. And then, again, when they upgraded to a bigger house six years later, they picked a new house “a few streets away.”
And just like Ms. Reynolds sings, the children went to school and then to university, and it’s likely a golf game or two was played, and the martinis were mixed dry. But, finally in 2012 – 13, the Wexlers did get some architecture: a bespoke cottage-country recreational property designed by architect Michael Taylor (they’d seen a writeup in The Globe and Mail by John Bentley Mays on a house he’d done on the Scarborough Bluffs and were smitten).
But, some years after that, the itch was still there: “We tried to move south, and it just didn’t happen,” says Ms. Wexler.
To wit, they purchased a condo at Avenue Road and St. Clair Avenue West that was “big and old and needed gutting,” and asked Mr. Taylor to have a look. He wasn’t impressed, and as the Wexlers dove into the logistics and limitations of renovating under condominium board rules, neither were they. They never actually moved into the condo, and it was sold just before the pandemic hit. They put in a few offers on midtown houses and “were outbid by half a million dollars every time,” leaving them in their Thornhill digs.
So, like many of us, they took a hard look at the walls of their home during the early shut-in days of 2020. Yes, there were too many walls, and in strange places, too. Some had openings/passthroughs that looked onto nothing. There was even a ‘structural’ column that wasn’t holding up anything except pretension. Flooring wasn’t consistent, there were too many popcorn ceilings and not enough natural light. But would a ‘real’ architect take it on? Mr. Taylor, after all, had worked for the legendary Barton Myers, spent considerable time at KPMB, and had been a founding partner of Taylor Smyth Architects.
“Some clients are a bit more challenging than others, and some are just a joy to work with, and these two are in the latter category,” says Mr. Taylor.
But a full gut of the main floor, the tweaking of a few rooms on the second, and other bits and bobs in the basement meant the Wexlers had to move out for over a year. And, as usual, the unexpected reared its expensive head: “There was a structural beam … that wasn’t all the way across the floor, the floors had a two-and-a-half-inch slope from the centre to either wall,” says Mr. Wexler. And behind the family room fireplace? A drain pipe sitting dangerously close to the gas line.
“So badly built,” says Mr. Taylor.
Today, those memories are washed away by copious amounts of sunlight, razor-straight white oak panels, wide, consistent flooring, hidden lighting and playful pendants, and the sense of calm and order that only good architecture and a good builder – in this case Desar Construction Studio – can provide.
Borrowing space from the two-car garage, one now steps into a wide foyer that offers a peek into a Moroccan-style conversation area through a sexy wooden screen (Ms. Wexler is of Moroccan heritage); rather than a shiny brass pin-holed fixture, however, the more subtle Misko S3 by B.lux warms the space. Further in is the widened dining area – no longer a bowling alley – with an enviable wall of storage. In the kitchen, Mr. Taylor has added so many windows it reads like an addition; here, the oak has been softened by white uppers, and there is so much additional storage the Wexlers laugh at the memory of barely being able to store cutlery.
Drinking in an equal amount of light is the family room, opposite, where the fireplace was jettisoned in favour of photons. And to keep the architectural conversation between rooms flowing, Mr. Taylor has allowed a small gap between the structural post and the wall. And the post, like its siblings, has been dressed in a natty suit of oak.
“How do we take what could be something ugly and in the way and turn it into a feature?” asks Mr. Taylor rhetorically. “We decided to make them something that adds to the experience … we could have just tied this all together and hidden them but we wanted to pull walls apart.”
“And I’m so glad,” says Mr. Wexler, “because two of our grandchildren use the space between the column and the wall to sneak through.”
From ticky tacky to terrific. And sleek. And sexy. And very, very well thought out. But it didn’t come cheap: the Wexlers say it cost more to renovate this house than to build their cottage (granted, that was over a dozen years ago, and prices have skyrocketed).
But they don’t care: “We didn’t go into this thinking about ‘can we sell it?’ We went into it thinking that we want to have a space that we really enjoy coming into, and Michael excels at giving you that kind of a space.”