Award: Ravine House

site

The house is on a deep half-acre lot surrounded on two sides by a heavily treed ravine in Rosedale, a wealthy neighborhood located just northeast of downtown Toronto, Ontario.



program

A residence for a family with six children. It is also designed for entertaining and accommodating a range of social, business-related, and cultural events, including fundraisers that often involve large numbers of guests.



solution

The house is a rare example of modernist design in a traditional nineteenth-century suburb where the typical palette tends toward Victorian, Edwardian, and other revivalist styles. Both discreet and distinctive, the L-shaped house takes the form of a pair of two-story, oversized buff-brick volumes joined by a single-story pavilion clad in mahogany. The vertical volumes contain the private functions?bedrooms, studies, family rooms?while the pavilion contains dining/living and kitchen/service functions that flow together. The dining room opens onto the back terrace through large glass doors, which dissolve the sense of inside and outside. Interior spaces are flexible, accommodating an informal family home and serving as a more formal venue for large gatherings and entertaining by means of a series of sliding and pivoting doors used throughout. The client's collection of modern art and twentieth-century furniture reinforces the neomodernist sensibility of the architectural composition.

The approach to the house is through a landscaped forecourt. A backlit teak fence with a zinc liner surrounds the property, creating a sense of privacy and containment for a series of outdoor rooms, in particular the convivial limestone terraces in the back courtyard, which contains a small pool and affords views to the ravine.

The structural system is hybrid, putting together conventional wood framing with localized steel framing to support cantilevered projections and entrance canopies. The house's construction techniques combine a refined, artisanal level of custom workmanship with contemporary building technologies. Custom-profile doors and windows are milled from mahogany and finished with a dark stain. The interior material palette includes elm floors, plaster-coated drywall, and stainless-steel flatbar. Mahogany and wenge millwork are combined in extensive built-in elements. beth kapusta



credits

client: Gerald Sheff and Shanitha Kachan architect: Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects (KPMB), Toronto?Bruce Kuwabara (partner-in-charge); Kevin Bridgman, Paulo Rocha (project architects) landscape architect: NAK Design (planting design); Cornelia Hahn Oberlander (landscape consultant); KPMB (built landscape) engineers: Yolles Partnership (structural); Merber (M/E/P) general contractor: Eisner-Murray Developments lighting: Suzanne Powadiuk area: 11,000 square feet cost: withheld