Craven Highway Cottage / Ania Moryoussef Architect (AMA)

Craven Highway Cottage / Ania Moryoussef Architect (AMA)

Textual content description offered by the architects. The whole transformation of this unassuming single-story employee’s cottage in Toronto’s historic “Tiny City” turned a run-down home right into a luminous and ethereal pandemic refuge. The shopper, Laurel Hutchison, is a retired schoolteacher residing on a set earnings, with a finances earmarked for primary renovations to rescue her 112-year-old residence from disrepair. The result’s a 720 sqft, delicately proportioned, light-filled residence, constructed on its authentic foundations whereas re-envisioning each different side of the employee’s cottage vernacular – a turn-of-the-century housing typology that has nearly utterly disappeared from town.

Context. Craven Highway represents an uncommon city situation. Beforehand often called Erie Terrace, the road was initially developed to accommodate lower-income laborers and immigrants within the early twentieth century. With small dwellings lining solely the road’s east aspect, and a municipal fence operating alongside the west, this atypical thoroughfare was the location of Toronto’s highest focus of indifferent houses beneath 500 sqft. As we speak, Craven Highway stays a close-knit group and distinctive architectural outpost in an more and more unaffordable metropolis.

The reinvention of the Typology and the Consumer Transient. With the unique footprint intact, and heights of partitions, roof angles, and window-to-wall percentages strictly pre-determined by the Metropolis’s renovation tips, the design course of entailed a cautious examine of the prevailing employee’s cottage typology so as to have the ability to de-construct, rework, re-interpret, and re-construct the house in a totally trendy approach.

The primary design methods included flipping this system alongside the plan’s lengthy axis, re-orienting the plan in the direction of the intimate south-facing courtyard, and creating a way of compression and growth by reinventing the roof’s conventional gable as a 36-foot lengthy sawtooth clerestory to flood the house with pure gentle and recent air. Extra apertures had been strategically launched to attract in gentle from numerous instructions and seamlessly join the inside to its small backyard whereas obscuring direct views into the house from the skin. Collectively, these formal and phenomenological methods create a way of a extremely animated, ever-unfolding area that defies the bodily boundaries of the 720sf residence.

These design choices had been a direct response to the shopper’s mandate: a need for ample gentle, peacefulness, and a relative sense of seclusion from her busy city environment. In response to this need for impressed solitude – the place one will be alone, however not lonely – the house has been remodeled right into a vessel of sunshine and shadow, the place the 2 nearly appear to inhabit the area, alongside Laurel. Regardless of its comparatively minimalist aesthetic, the house at all times feels full. To additional emphasize this, the 16-foot-tall inside facade of the house’s north wall, which types a backdrop to the house’s foremost residing areas, acts as a projection display for the ever-changing colour, glow, and shadow of the passing day and seasons, together with the dappled gentle and arboreal silhouettes of the mature city forest on the west aspect of Craven Highway.

Ageing-In-Place, Affordability, and Upkeep. The house consists of 4 rooms: a mixed entry, residing, eating, and kitchen area; a small studio/den that would accommodate a single mattress; a mixed washroom/laundry room; and a principal bed room. This simple program was complemented by an aging-in-place technique that integrates a U-shaped kitchen for simple circulation; a curbless wetroom appropriate for accessibility gear with partitions blocked for future seize bars; LED lighting and sturdy finishes to advertise low upkeep and power payments; sleeping area for a possible live-in caregiver; and a entrance porch designed to accommodate a future ramp, with a cover that protects in opposition to climate.