This is a beautiful house:

Designed by Johnsen Schmaling Architects and located in Milwaukee's Lower East Side neighborhood, the home sits on a long 24-foot wide parcel that backs onto the Milwaukee River.

When I first saw where it was located I immediately assumed that it was a coveted location. I mean, the backyard terraces down and has direct access to the water. But one of the things that's interesting about this lot is that it had been sitting vacant for over two decades!

According to the architect, the city had condemned and demolished the previous house, and so the current owners purchased the vacant lot directly from the Milwaukee Department of City Development. Every market is different.

I don't know Milwaukee, like at all. But I did spend a good 15 minutes street viewing the area. And I have come to the informed conclusion that this is the kind of first home you build for yourself when you're a resolute urbanist.

This is where you live when you don't want to have to drive everywhere and when you want to be able to walk down to Brady Street for dinner. I respect this. So as much as I enjoy the architecture (I love a good courtyard), I think the context surrounding this build is equally interesting.

Here is a forgotten urban lot, directly on the water, that was vacant and overlooked for over twenty years. Obviously, nobody saw any value in it. Then one day, some people came along and said "let's create something incredible." And that's exactly what they did.

This is one of the things that makes cities so wonderful. They are always evolving. And there are always opportunities that others are overlooking.

Photos via Johnsen Schmaling Architects

Canada is a metric country. We started adopting the metric system in 1970 and in 1971 we got the Weights and Measures Act. But even though we are officially a metric country, it is still common to use the imperial system in everyday life. For example, my driver's license says 190 cm, but I would never tell someone this, unless I were in Europe. I would use feet and inches.

The other area where it is common to use the imperial system is in construction and real estate. Officially, all drawings submitted to a municipality need to be in metric. Typically millimeters are used, meaning a common residential floor-to-floor height in Toronto works out to something like 2950 or 3000 if you want 9 feet clear to the underside of each slab.

As you can see, in design and construction it is very common to switch back and forth between millimeters and feet/inches. Marketing floor plans are typically always in square feet as well. A lot of this, I'm sure, has to do with our historical ties to the UK and our deep integration with the US market.

But the reality is that switching back and forth is inefficient, and imperial weights and measures feel like a random and outdated system. Nate Bargatze does a hilarious job of highlighting that in this SNL skit called Washington's Dream. So I don't know about you, but I'm ready to go full metric. I wonder what it will take for the US to finally get on board with the rest of the world.

(Thanks to my business partner Lucas for sharing the above skit with me. I'm a big Nate Bargatze fan.)

Cover photo by patricia serna on Unsplash

Home, as I've always said, is not an actual building typology. A home can be anything. For some people, a comfortable home might be a suburban single-family house in a bucolic community. And for others, a home might be two converted office spaces in Le Marais that also double as a highly coveted event space for art and design. That's the thing about homes, they're very personal.

This latter scenario describes the home of Jérémy Rocher and Kym Ellery -- a space that seems to be making the rounds in Paris and getting people in the art and design community excited. It was featured in HTSI magazine over the weekend and looks like the below. (In case you were wondering, the answer is yes, that is a piece by James Turrell.)

The design brief given to architect Simon Pesin was to create "a home and a meeting place for art." This is a fascinating use case to me. Because it's cool and interesting and, in my view, a positive thing for the city. Brands like Danish furniture company Frama are some of the groups that have programmed it, which suggests there's maybe a need for more unique spaces like this.

But at the same time, as a real estate developer, it's mostly impossible to underwrite spaces like this. If you were developing this building and thinking about the various buyers/tenants who may want to one day occupy it, this segment would never be on your list. In fact, it is yet another example of Jane Jacobs' famous mantra that "new ideas require old buildings." This is an old building. Here's an excerpt from HTSI:

Rocher bought the property six years ago, though he and Ellery only moved in last year. “It’s funny, the property was on the market for six months because people didn’t see the potential behind it,” he says of what was formerly two office spaces fitted with partition walls, false ceilings and carpeting. “Even the windows and skylights were hidden,” he adds, pointing skyward.

Thankfully, all you need is one person to see the potential. That is one of the magical things about cities.

Photos: Depasquale + Maffini