Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Tag: home

  • A home not a unit

    I dislike the term residential unit.

    It makes a home sound like some sort of widget. When have you ever heard someone say, “unit sweet unit”? Never. And yet this is generally what we use to refer to housing that comes in an apartment form and is not grade-related.

    If you build low-rise houses, you’re a home builder. But anything beyond that, and the home moniker apparently needs to fall away.

    There is, of course, a very good reason for this and it is that we have a longstanding history of not liking apartments. And so this is in all likelihood some sort of carryover of that bias. Surely there’s no way to create a morally-correct home in an apartment. So let’s use a more utilitarian sounding name, like unit.

    I’m sure that I have used the word “unit” countless times on this blog throughout the years. But I am working to remove it from my vocabulary. And now you can all hold me accountable to that.

  • Home Tour: Concrete plinth house

    This is a really nice kitchen extension. In response to an “oppressively” low ceiling height, the architects — DGN Studio — lowered the existing ground floor by about 500mm. At the same time, they created a kind of “concrete tray” that fills the width of the Victorian home’s property and extends outward to create a sunken patio space off said kitchen. From the outside, this drop makes the house feel as if it’s sitting on a concrete plinth — hence the name. (A good photo of this can be found here.) It’s a simple move, but a good one. Sometimes you just have to play with the section. If you can’t see the above video, click here.

  • The Monocle Book of Homes

    Monocle has new book coming out called The Monocle Book of Homes. It’s a guide to 20 exceptional residences from around the world, spanning everywhere from Mexico and Australia to Finland and Lebanon. In addition to these home tours, the book is intended to serve as a kind of how-to guide for improving your own living space. There’s also a portion dedicated to inspiring neighborhoods and community-driven urban projects. I don’t have a copy of this book and so I can’t vouch for its life-enhancing abilities. But Monocle generally has good taste and always takes nice photos. So I think many of you will appreciate this book. It’s available for pre-order over here.

  • Best innovative suite design

    Junction House won “Best Innovative Suite Design” at the 39th BILD Awards (2019) last night. A big congrats to the team. Below is the floor plan that won. It is a 2 bedroom suite from our two-storey House Collection (JH_2B_H1).

    This design is fundamental to Junction House. It is why the project is called what it is. The goal was to create a suite that felt less like a condo, and more like a low-rise single-family home. Credit to Superkul Architects, and the rest of the team, for figuring it all out. There was a long list of requirements.

    We wanted dedicated kitchen (+ island), dining, and living areas. (The living area is also wider than what you’d typically find.) We wanted a terrace with (standard) water and BBQ connections. We wanted the bedrooms upstairs for privacy/separation. We wanted both of them to have direct window exposure. And we wanted a master ensuite bathroom with a double vanity.

    The House Collection includes some of my favorite suites in the building, which is why — full disclosure — I’m going to be moving into one of them. If you’d like more information about Junction House, reach out to Paul Johnston and his team at info@junctionhouse.ca or at 416-900-6076.

  • Firm Profile: APOLLO Architects & Associates

    This afternoon my friend Gabriel, of Gabriel Fain Architects, sent me the work of APOLLO Architects & Associates. They are based in Japan and South Korea. Here is a preview of some of their “private houses”:

    There is a lot that I love about these homes. 

    I love their simplicity. Look at this handrail detail. Nothing more than what is absolutely necessary.

    I love their modesty. Many of the above homes hover around 150 square meters and many of them are much much smaller. 

    I love that each project’s description starts by talking about the owners and the site conditions, signaling that each home represents an individual response tailored to both the occupants and the context.

    And I love that many of these homes have been built on unthinkably small parcels of land in dense urban settings; parcels that would be dismissed as entirely useless in other parts of the world. 

    The site area for this home is 46.53 square meters and the building’s footprint is 36.93 square meters.

    Of course the Japanese housing market is a unique place. It’s worth pointing that out. 

    But as I browsed through what are effectively custom single family homes, I couldn’t help but be reminded that there’s a fine line between need and want.

    Small can be very beautiful. But small is also subjective.

  • Why Millennial homeownership is so low

    The Urban Institute has a new study out that looks to explain why Millennial homeownership rates are lower than that of previous generations. The typical refrain is that Millennials have a lot more student debt and that the cost of housing in urban centers has risen faster than income levels. But this report tries to put some math behind those explanations. All data is for the US.

    Not surprisingly, marriage and kids are significant drivers, and Millennials appear to be delaying both. According to the study, being married increases the probability of owning a home by 18%. If marriage rates in 2015 were the same as they were in 1990 (this is the time period for the study), the Millennial homeownership rate would be 5% higher. Having a kid increases the probability by about 6.2%.

    There’s also a widening spread between the homeownership rates for more educated and less educated Millennials. Presumably the distinction is a 4 year university degree. Between 1990 and 2015, the spread between the two groups increased from 3.3% to 9.7%. This was identified as an area of “great concern” because of the possible long term implications.

    Combine this phenomenon with the stats that white households have a higher homeownership rate compared to all other racial groups and that having parents who are homeowners increases the likelihood of also owning a home (let’s ignore, for a second, the other intergenerational transfers of wealth), and you have a recipe for rising wealth disparities.

    Of course, some of you will undoubtedly argue that in this part of the world we are overly fixated on homeownership as a mechanism for wealth creation. I mean, there are many examples of very wealthy countries with homeownership rates that are far less than what they are here in Canada and the US. But that’s a discussion for a different blog post.

    If you’d like to go through the full Millennial Homeownership report, you can do that here.

  • True North by Alain Carle Architecte

    I just recently discovered the work of Montréal-based firm, Alain Carle Architecte. If you aren’t familiar with their work, do yourself a favor and check it out here. They are apparently known for their secondary homes across the country.

    The project that caught my attention was their True North home in Cornwall, Ontario. Here are two photos by renowned architecture and design photographer Adrien Williams (also of Montréal).

    imageimage

    And here is a plan via Dezeen.

    image

    The concrete and black metal cladding against the snow is pure magic. I also love the way they employed black screens to create a gradient across the landscape and frame some of the outdoor spaces. You really see that in the plan.

    The shadows these screens cast on the concrete are also quite beautiful.

  • First 3D printed home in America

    The video below is a good follow-up to my recent post about the 100 million city and the rapid population growth that we are seeing in some parts of the developing world.

    If you can’t see the embedded video below, click here.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvM7jFZGAec?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

    It’s a video about what is allegedly the “first permitted, 3D-printed home in America” – an 800 square foot home that was built/printed in Austin during SXSW in about 24 hours.

    The project is a partnership between New Story (a non-profit) and ICON (a construction technologies company), and the goal is to pioneer a fast and cheap housing model for the developing world.

    The cost for the above home is said to be about $4,000.

  • What are the most important condo and rental building amenities?

    Last night I casually asked the

    Twittersphere

    what the most important condo amenity is, besides a gym. 

    That tweet got quite a few responses – everything from rock climbing to a proper facility for realtor lock boxes.

    Given the response, I thought it would be worthwhile to be a bit more rigorous in this analysis. So I have created an online survey that you can very quickly fill out by clicking here. 

    Here’s how this is going to work:

    – You have to enter your email address. Sorry, some friction. I figured that would make the data a bit more reliable. Don’t worry your email is safe.

    – You can select a maximum of 3 amenities. One of them can be “Other”, in which case you would then enter in an amenity not already found on the list.

    – The order of the amenities in the survey is being randomized so as to avoid any possible it’s-near-the-top-and-I’m-too-lazy-to-scroll bias.

    – You’ll be able to see the results of the survey after you’ve responded. I’ll also post the results to this blog so that it’s public and people learn things. Individual emails will, of course, never be published.

    Developers should be building what people actually want and will use. Now is your chance to tell us what that is. Click here for the survey.

  • UNStudio announces new tech architecture company (and thoughts on the smart home)

    Dutch architecture firm UNStudio has just launched a new company called UNSense, whose purpose is to explore and develop “new sensor-based technologies that are specifically designed to positively impact people’s physical, mental and social health.” They are calling the new business an “arch tech company” and it is their belief that, at some point, all architecture firms will become arch tech companies. You can learn more about UNSense, here.

    This announcement got me thinking about the state of smart home technologies, which, of course, is this massive buzzword that everyone is throwing around these days. Many of us have smart thermostats, voice assistants (that may be listening to our every word), wifi lights, and so on. And you can do some pretty neat things with software like IFTT, such as program your lights to come on at sunset or when you walk in the door.

    But as cool as they may be, these smart home devices have always felt like patchwork add-ons to me. I understand that this is partially driven by what customers can easily adopt and I don’t mean to discredit the value that they bring, but today’s post is about reminding us to also think more fundamentally, as opposed to just incrementally.

    Smart thermostats, for instance, give us the functionality to adjust our heating/cooling from our phone. But at the end of the day, they still control the same underlying system, which, by the way, is a fairly simple one. When it gets cold (because of our R-3 windows), the heat turns on. When it gets warm enough, the heat turns off. Zoned systems certainly add another layer of sophistication, but are we optimizing for the right variables?

    UNSense works at three scales: Cities, Buildings, and Interiors. And if you look at what they are trying to do at the building scale, it is around the interface between inside and out. Designing transformable facade systems and buildings that can respond to their environment and our changing needs. These are not new ideas, but in today’s tech-driven world, the timing may just be right.

    If you think about the climate we have here in Toronto, it is actually an incredibly difficult design problem. We have cold winters and hot humid summers, which means we have to solve for two different extremes. Mechanical systems have made that a lot easier to do, but if we’re going to meet the energy and greenhouse gas emission targets that we’re all talking about, we’re going to need a hell of a lot more than just smart thermostats.

    Image: UNSense