House 60

"Family-friendly design" is a term not commonly applied to modernist boxes. It's more often equated with suburban castles and their multi-tasking great rooms. But in the striking modern structure inhabited by Toronto's Allison Granovsky and her family, a sense of domesticity is implicit in the design.

"This is a really family-friendly house," says Granovsky, standing in a corridor lined with flawless clear glass, white walls and polished concrete. The backdrop is an airy atrium backed by a two-storey curtain wall. "The kids love to run in circles," she says.

House 60, a renovation by local boutique firm GH3, harnesses modernist ideals of openness and light - along with intelligent planning - to balance a serene space with the demands and clutter of normal family life. When Granovsky first bought the house with her husband in 2007, it was a redbrick'50s dwelling with low ceilings and a cut-up floor plan. Charging GH3's Pat Hanson with a fresh start led to a quick and decisive process (two months of design and nine months of construction) that would transform the building beyond all recognition.

Hanson, a former partner at the Toronto firm ArchitectsAlliance, has been developing - with partner and landscape architect Diana Gerrard - a language of spare, spatially complex interiors in private homes as part of a diverse practice that includes public parks and educational buildings. She is committed to sustainable building, and instead of razing the existing house she recommended renovating and expanding it. This meant bringing a radically new aesthetic to the midtown neighbourhood while creating a new, efficient envelope and systems. "These are poky fifty-year-old houses that are performing very poorly and have the added problem of being dull," says Hanson of the nearby homes, which are increasingly being wiped out for monster-sized replacements. "I feel good about what we've done here. We kept as much as possible while reinventing this house for a new era." The original building was stripped to its foundation and frame, and the completed project reads like an entirely new house. The pitched roof and brick facades are gone; in their place is a straitlaced composition of stucco and glass. There is about 50 per cent more floor space, bringing the total to 300 square metres, thanks to modest extensions at the front and back, and a repurposing of the garage. There's now an entry hall and a kitchen. And with 3.4-metre ceilings, polished concrete floors and stainless steel cabinetry, the two-storey structure carries off the drama and expansive volumes of a good loft conversion.

Hanson's open plan is defined by carefully controlled window openings and living spaces that flow poetically between levels and around corners. A few steps up from the kitchen, the living, dining and family sitting areas run from front to back in a long, open corridor. The glazing at the front of the house welcomes views from the quiet side street; at the back, the curtain wall explodes with bright vistas across the backyard, a stand of trees, and a schoolyard next door. Upstairs, three kids' rooms and a home office and master suite occupy separate halves of the floor, using every square centimetre efficiently. The two youngest, who are twins, share a long walk-in closet that is a favourite play space.

All this respects modernist orthodoxy and Granovsky's desire that the house be "open, highly functional, with no wasted space." Indeed, from the front, it has some of the same white-box asceticism of Le Corbusier's houses of the '20s, but it's black rather than white. Likewise, the design is not a prototype for grand architectural ideas, but a careful response to the needs of a family, tied to a very particular, spare set of aesthetic choices.
Besides its structural elements, the house is elevated by the interior's determined sparseness. The material palette selected by Granovsky (an interior designer whose wardrobe comprises "a ton of black") is all shades
of black, white and bianco carrera. "I've always lived with black and white," she says. "I can't imagine doing anything else." The living room is a still life with two '40s French leather chairs, a Nienkämper sofa and an Eames surfboard table.

Yet all this visual poetry owes much to a prosaic architectural idea. One word: storage. Along the north and south edges of these rooms are two strips, each about a metre deep, that contain a stair, closets, entertainment units, a bar and a fireplace. These servant spaces are hidden behind floorto-ceiling pivoting white doors; they are invisible when closed but conceal a tremendous amount of stuff. This is a livable form of minimalism, freedom from clutter as a way of living more peacefully.

"There is a certain freedom to living like this," says Hanson, whose own home has similar devices. "You can have stuff and acquire stuff. But you don't always want to be surrounded by it." As an alternative form of embellishment, House 60 offers some subtle eye candy. There are hints of ornament in a few places, as in the white-on-white wallpaper with a broad floral pattern upstairs and a similar motif in the living and dining rooms (achieved with laser-cut 3M film that carries across alternating patterns of drywall and glass). There are a series of internal windows throughout, a device of gh3's that creates an unusually layered spatial experience from room to room, and from the interior to the outdoors. This connection emerges most clearly near the curtain wall and the atrium at the back of the house. From the master suite, Granovsky can look down through large windows at their living room, and then at the entire backyard and the park beyond. Even so, the new windows might not be the last word. "This isn't a permanent solution," Hanson explains. "Really, these could be Juliet balconies, but with kids that doesn't seem practical."
"That's right," Granovsky says, surveying the long drop down to the glossy hardwood in the family room. "There's only so much a mother can worry about."

Text by Alex Bozikovic