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.
We were having pizza at Davanza’s the other night and I started flipping through one of those real estate magazines that you find scattered around places like Park City.
Now, more often than not, when I come across a house listed for tens of millions of dollars, I usually look at it and think to myself, “okay, I know this is a really expensive home and it is likely that someone will want to buy it, but I objectively don’t like it.”
However, as I was flipping through the magazine, I came across this listing and instead thought, “hey, this is actually a really cool house.”
Designed by Wallace Cunningham, the 8,000 sf home features a cascading roof line that looks like an “S” in plan. (It also seems like all of the interior spaces were laid out in service of this plan design, which, depending on your own architectural proclivities, could be considered either a perfectly fine thing or an arbitrary thing.)
Click here if you can’t see the embedded video above.
This is a 93 square foot former boiler room that was transformed by San Francisco-based architect Christi Azevedo into a full service guest apartment. The ground floor only measures 8’2″ x 11’6″ and so a taller volume was created to house a separate sleeping area and bathroom above. Designing small spaces forces you to be creative and consider each element carefully. This tiny home is a good example of that.
Daniel Foch, Daniel Clark, and Adam Darvay recently stopped by Mackay Laneway House to film a last-minute video tour before the new tenants move in. They had quite the rig setup (see above). There was also a drone flying around that is not pictured here. The full house tour should be available in about two weeks and I’ll be sure to share here on the blog.
One of the things we talked about during the tour was the future of laneway housing in Toronto. Will we see strong adoption going forward and, if yes, what does that mean for Toronto’s laneways? I think we will continue to see a steady increase in the number of laneway suites that get built in Toronto each year. And so eventually this form of living will become a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape. It’s happening fast.
Now consider what this could mean for Toronto’s laneways. As garages and parking spaces get slowly replaced by new housing, it will mean that our laneways could at some point flip from being vehicle first to pedestrian first. Mackay Laneway House does not have any vehicular parking. The front door is off the laneway. You enter on foot. That’s how you experience the lane. And Gabriel and I thought it should be celebrated.
If or when this tipping point occurs, it will trigger a perception change. Slowly but surely we will start to think of our lanes not as back of house, but as front of house. And when that happens, it’ll almost certainly force us to rethink how we design them. Forget utilitarian. Our laneways have the potential to become some of the most pedestrian-friendly streets in the city, especially with a few streetscape and landscape improvements.
Pushing this idea even further, could you imagine a world where our laneways not only become more front of house, but where the laneway side becomes the more desirable side of the property? If we gave people the option, how many would prefer to build their main house on what is today considered to be the backside? (Remember how things once flipped in Paris?)
But for the fact that we have an entrenched built form that could make this “inversion” challenging, I think there are people who would prefer to have their front door on the quieter and more pedestrian-friendly side of their property. Either way, I continue to believe that we are in the early stages of an ADU/laneway housing revolution. And things are just getting started.
To celebrate the launch of their Guide to Cosy Homes (2015), Monocle Films produced a number of home tours.
Die Es, pictured above, is the home of South African architects Gawie and Gwen Fagan. They started building their home in 1964, just as they were starting their practice.
Because of this, they had little money and had to do a lot of the work themselves. They sold their car to buy a concrete mixer.
Although they didn’t set out to explicitly design a “Cape” house, it ended up that way, with heavy thermal masses, white walls, and so on.
The architecture also relates very closely to the surrounding landscape – as it should – in the way in which it frames views of the water and mountains.
The mediterranean climate also really comes through in the materiality of the home and the connections to outside.
If you’d like to watch the 5 minute tour of Die Es, click here.
