To tear down or to renovate: that is the question many owners of old houses ask themselves sooner or later. There is no simple answer. Bulldozing a Toronto dwelling and building again from scratch is expensive. But so is a thoughtful, top-to-bottom make-over by a good architect.
Not that everyone who hankers for a change in living circumstances starts with something top-to-bottom in mind. In the course of researching this column, I have met several people in brand-new homes who initially planned to do nothing more adventurous than knock out a few walls and raise a few low ceilings in their elderly houses. After totting up the numbers, and coming to grips with what was really needed to make their homes livable, however, they decided it wouldn’t be that much more costly to rip down the structures, hire architects, and start over.
But fortunately for admirers of the unshowy rhythms of downtown Toronto’s streetscapes, homeowners who might be able to demolish and put up something new often end up renovating instead. They like the feel and exterior look of the big family homes the Victorians and Edwardians gave us, even if some ideas of our ancestors about interior space have become woefully obsolete. The successful renovation of such places requires the talents of a designer with both respect for the past and a firm grasp of contemporary notions about comfortable modern living.
If a certain house I recently visited is anything to go on, Kyra Clarkson, who renovated it, is an emerging Toronto architect with a good handle on both local history and design ideas that sync with urban life nowadays.
This 3,000-square-foot, three-storey family home is not, on the face of it, something I would have thought worthy of salvation. It was put up around 1908 on a street of similarly ample, routine residences south of Forest Hill. The sturdy brick volume spreads almost to the edges of its double-wide lot, and turns a sober, slightly dour face to the street. At the rear a wing extends into the broad garden from one corner, giving the overall plan of the project an L shape. The house belongs to an era when middle-class people had live-in servants: That’s who slept in the small rooms under the dormer on the third floor, which is now reserved for guests of the current owners, a professional couple.
If I found it underwhelming, the two people who live there – one a “traditionalist,” the other a “minimalist,” the architect told me – liked the exterior, and wanted few changes made in its appearance. Ms. Clarkson’s one conspicuous external enhancement is a deck out back that extends along much of the house’s width.
Most of her energy went into the interior. Yet even here the surgery Ms. Clarkson performed has been subtle. She replaced the floors and created a light, open atmosphere throughout. And though she reduced the number of bedrooms from five to four, the old-fashioned general sense of the original scheme – the clearly articulated sequence of living room, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor, for example – has survived intact.
What makes this renovation interesting is not any single, large architectural move, since high drama was neither needed nor called for. It’s rather the accumulation of several modest gestures that bring the house into the 21st century while preserving what made it attractive to its owners. (One of these gestures – invisible, and perhaps not all that modest – was the installation of a geothermal heating and cooling system.)
In the state Ms. Clarkson found it, the kitchen was dark and gloomy. It is now bright, inviting and modern, as her clients, who love to cook, wanted it to be. The massive gas-burning La Cornue stove suggests that they take their cooking seriously indeed, so it’s good that they have a pleasant place in which to do it.
The old stairway up to the second and third levels, like the kitchen, was a cramped, unwelcoming feature of the house. For some reason Toronto builders of multi-storey residences, even relatively posh ones like this, often treated stairwells as tiresome things to be done as cheaply and meanly as possible. In her one really bold intervention, Ms. Clarkson ripped out the old flight of steps and replaced it with a floating stair that rises gracefully, like a well-lit corridor, through the volume of the house, lending it a unity it did not have before.
As Ms. Clarkson’s quiet but thoroughgoing modernization shows, even a fusty old dwelling like this one can be rescued from obsolescence without gutting its heart and soul.