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I keep coming across actor Jason Statham's homes (or former homes) in design publications. At the beginning of this year, he and model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley sold their Malibu beach house for $18.5 million. It was beautiful. And last month, he listed a home -- he seems to have many -- near LA's Sunset Strip for $6.995m. (Pictured above.) A renovation of an existing 1957 house, Statham purchased the house in 2015 for $2.7mm and completed a meticulous renovation with Standard Architecture. Look at that roofline! For those of you in the market, here's the listing.
Photo: ©Benny Chan | fotoworks
I was looking at this laneway house for sale in Toronto today. It’s located near Queen and Bathurst. It has 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms and is about 2,331 square feet (that looks to include a basement). The lot appears to be just over 13′ wide. And the asking price is $2,845,000.
Single family homes aren’t typically considered on a per square foot basis, but if you do the math here, it works out to be around $1,220 psf. The property previously sold in 2017 for $805,000, which was prior to it being redeveloped. So it likely traded based on land value.
When Toronto first started considering modern laneway houses, some people thought that only individuals of questionable moral fiber would want to live in one. But today, there are countless examples of some pretty remarkable laneway houses.
And in some cases you might need about $3 million or so.
The Spaces just featured 21 Scott Street in Bronte (a suburb of Sydney) as its property of the week. (The home is currently listed.)
Designed by MCK Architects, the home is also called the “Upsilon House” and was supposedly designed for a fashion-industry couple.
Two things should immediately stand out to you about the house. One is how long and narrow the site and house are.
Here is a lengthwise view of the main living floor:
Based on the plans provided by The Agency (listing agency), the house is about ~3.9m wide. That’s because of its tight site. However, the clerestory windows that run the length of the house would provide ample light.
The other thing that should stand out is all of the exposed concrete. The Spaces calls it “soft brutalism.” I personally love it, but I recognize that it’s not for everyone.
In any event, it reminded me of a recent blog post by Witold Rybczynski in which he responded to the New York Times calling Habitat in Montreal a brutalist building. His rebuttal: that’s a gross over-simplification. Brutalism, in its truest sense, is about dramatizing the “rough character of concrete.”
But I particularly enjoyed how he ended the post:
“There is another litmus test of Brutalism. Buildings like Habitat remain popular with their users. If people don’t hate it, it can’t be Brutalist.”
If that’s the case, then 21 Scott is certainly not Brutalism in my book.
Images via MCK Architects
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