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This isn't a laneway suite per se, but Office Ou here in Toronto recently completed this garage conversion. The idea was to take a typical rear laneway garage and turn it into something that could better house a wide range of uses.
As Toronto reconsiders its laneways and as fewer people own cars (a separate topic to be debated), we are likely to see many of these spaces rethought. In this case, the result is a true extension of the existing home. You probably want to have a nice looking car -- a Porsche would do -- if you're going to continue to use it for that purpose.
I'm drawn to spaces like this because I start imagining all of the different use cases: a dining room, an office, a studio for photoshoots, a place for Pecha Kuchas, and so on. In big and expensive cities it can be rare to have that bit of extra space that allows you to tinker and experiment. And I am a big fan of tinkering.
Office Ou was founded by Nicolas Koff, Uros Novakovic, and Sebastian Bartnicki. Nicolas and I went to architecture school together both here in Toronto and in Philadelphia. Congratulations on completing a beautiful project.
Photo: Adrian Ozimek
The garage shown above (with the pseudo green roof) is located in the Chelsea neighborhood of London. It measures about 11’ x 7’ and it – along with the site it sits on – is about to go up for auction.
It’s expected to go for more than £550,000 according to the DailyMail UK, which would make it the most expensive garage ever sold in the UK. The site area is 535 square foot – about the size of an average 1 bedroom condo in Toronto.
Below is an aerial view of the site. It basically looks to be residual land.
But as awkward as this site might appear, the expected value is being driven by the fact that planning permissions were granted to turn it into this:
It’s a 2 bedroom house that feels a lot like a laneway house. It certainly fits the description of “a house behind a house”, which is often how laneway housing gets described here in Toronto.
I wanted to share it because it supports my belief that, sooner or later, Toronto will come around to laneway housing. As property prices rise and affordability continues to erode, people will – quite justifiably – start looking in all sorts of new places for a decent urban home.
Many thanks to my friend Adrian for sending me the link.
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