A one bedroom unit at 68 Abell St. in Toronto's Little Portugal neighbourhood.Right at Home Realty Inc.
When designers Coryn Kempster and Julia Jamrozik decided to move back to Toronto after 20 years of living abroad, they set out to find an apartment with an extra bedroom for their young child and quickly bumped into a term they’d never encountered, despite working as architects for the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron.
The condos they looked at, according to their real estate agents, had “outboard” and “inboard” bedrooms – development industry euphemisms for bedrooms with or without windows, respectively. Some, though not all, of the windowless bedrooms came fitted out with frosted glass sliding doors that opened onto a main room that did have an exterior window – an industry concept known, also euphemistically, as “borrowed light.”
Mr. Kempster says he reacted “viscerally” to such configurations. “I just couldn’t imagine raising my child in a windowless bedroom. I’m just not prepared to put my son through that.” The couple ended up buying a multi-unit dwelling, even though they had been perfectly content to live in an apartment after spending years in a European city.
This kind of unit configuration has been on offer in Toronto for more than a decade and reflects the growing prevalence of small, deep and narrow units in both mid-rise buildings and some high-rise projects with large floor plates. Many more will be in the development pipeline in coming years as the city moves to sharply up-zone areas near rapid transit stops.
The bedroom in the middle of the apartment has a sliding opaque glass door.Right at Home Realty Inc.
According to Ottawa architect Toon Dressen, the Ontario Building Code allows developers to combine rooms as a workaround to legislated minimum sizes, which means bedrooms that open up onto a larger area with natural light pass muster. Prior to the mid-2000s, bedrooms had to have windows, but the rules were tweaked. “It’s all price-driven,” he says. “You can sell a one bedroom for more than you sell a studio.”
Toronto’s policies are somewhat ambiguous. According to the city, bedrooms in secondary suites are supposed to have windows, though many basement apartments don’t. “The Code also prescribes the minimum unobstructed glass area for such rooms to be [at least] 5 per cent of the area served,” a city spokesperson said in an e-mail. “The Code does not mandate that bedroom windows be on the exterior of a building, nor does it prohibit interior bedrooms, provided a view to the outdoors can be achieved from inside the sleeping area.”
However, City council in 2020 adopted the so-called “Growing Up” guidelines, which are geared to making highrises more conducive to raising children. According to that 58-page document, which doesn’t have the force of regulation, the city says “[b]edrooms should have exterior windows to provide direct natural light. Where feasible, windows should be operable, with that portion higher up for safety, and to prevent objects falling out.”
In many projects with two- or three-bedroom family-focused units, the developers only partially satisfy these guidelines. For example, in the lower-level “Loft” floors of the Residences of Central Park, a large two-phase project now under construction near Sheppard and Leslie, 20 of the 25 unit layouts on each floor have inboard bedrooms, including most of the two- and three-bedroom apartments, according to the floor plans posted on the developer’s website.
Borrowed light
Floor plan of a proposed two-bedroom condo at the Biblio building, now under construction in Toronto's Leslieville neighbourhood.
INTERIOR: 836 sq. ft.
EXTERIOR: 69 sq. ft.
TERRACE
LIVING ROOM/ DINING/
KITCHEN
14' 7" X 16' 3"
REF
MW
DW
GLAZING
BEDROOM
8' 1" X 8' 11"
WC
5' X 11'
WC
5' X 8' 2"
MAIN
BEDROOM
9' 5" X 10' 10"
W/D
the globe and mail, Source: nvsble
Borrowed light
Floor plan of a proposed two-bedroom condo at the Biblio building, now under construction in Toronto's Leslieville neighbourhood.
INTERIOR: 836 sq. ft.
EXTERIOR: 69 sq. ft.
TERRACE
LIVING ROOM/ DINING/
KITCHEN
14' 7" X 16' 3"
REF
MW
DW
GLAZING
BEDROOM
8' 1" X 8' 11"
WC
5' X 11'
WC
5' X 8' 2"
MAIN
BEDROOM
9' 5" X 10' 10"
W/D
the globe and mail, Source: nvsble
Borrowed light
Floor plan of a proposed two-bedroom condo at the Biblio building, now under construction in Toronto's Leslieville neighbourhood.
INTERIOR: 836 sq. ft.
EXTERIOR: 69 sq. ft.
TERRACE
LIVING ROOM/ DINING/
KITCHEN
14' 7" X 16' 3"
REF
MW
DW
GLAZING
BEDROOM
8' 1" X 8' 11"
WC
5' X 11'
WC
5' X 8' 2"
MAIN
BEDROOM
9' 5" X 10' 10"
W/D
the globe and mail, Source: nvsble
While Toronto buyers have long become inured – or resigned – to this kind of floor plan, the issue of windowless bedrooms has exploded in the past two or three years into contentious development conflicts in cities such as New York, Chicago and Austin, Tex., where developers have sought to exploit a loophole in a national building code that allows bedrooms to be illuminated by natural or artificial light.
While that language isn’t new, the issue came to a head as cities began approving the post-pandemic conversion of office buildings, which typically have very large and deep floor plates, into residential.
The other flashpoint: an intensely divisive scheme unveiled last year by super-investor Charlie Munger, co-founder of Berkshire Hathaway, to construct a 4,500-unit student residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a benefactor. In that project, the vast majority of the rooms have no exterior windows whatsoever. Similar projects have sprung up next to the University of Texas, Austin. A public outcry last year forced Austin’s city council to ban windowless units altogether.
“I understand that human beings can survive almost any kind of environment,” says Austin architect Juan Miró, who has become an outspoken and widely cited critic of this kind of development. “It’s basically something that we thought we had left behind – which is the basic understanding of what are the minimum standards for housing.”
Those standards date back to late 19th- and early 20th-century housing and public health reforms meant to confront overcrowding in unsanitary, unsafe and poorly ventilated tenements in New York and other immigrant-receiving cities. Toronto likely banned windowless bedrooms in a 1923 bylaw, according to U.K. historian Richard Dennis, who has written extensively about the city’s apartments, although the city allowed workarounds, such as transom windows to a corridor or skylights.
The Residences at Central Park in Toronto now under construction at Leslie and Sheppard will have many one and two-bedroom units with window-less bedrooms.Core Architects
Today, Mr. Miró notes, in cities as diverse as Mexico City, Paris and New York, regulators require bedrooms to have windows. “In all cases, [it] is absolutely impossible to do what they’re doing in Toronto, or what they’re doing in our state,” says Mr. Miró, who also teaches at the University of Texas, Austin. “It’s completely illegal.”
In Hong Kong, adds Mr. Kempster, who doesn’t practice as an architect in Toronto, “you don’t just need a window [in every] bedroom. You need a window in every single space.” Those rules, he notes, “creates a very specific architectural response, but everyone still makes money.”
In much the same way, some of Toronto’s development policies encourage windowless bedrooms. “I don’t think it’s driven by cost,” says architect Pat Hanson, a founding principal of gh3* and a member of Waterfront Toronto’s Design Review Panel. “It’s driven a lot by building forms. Where you find a lot of these inboard bedrooms is in the mid-rise type.” The requirements to step back mid-rises on an angular plane, she adds, forces the developers to populate their projects with very deep units.
Ms. Hanson points out that it’s possible to compensate for the lack of natural light by thinking creatively about how the interior walls of an apartment are configured. “We work with a developer that uses sliding panels for bedroom doors and sliding doors for everything,” she says. “I think there’s ways of thinking about how much of walls are movable, like not all of them, but how they can open up to other spaces.”
Others observe that there’s no shortage of demand for such flats, especially among younger tenants who regard such apartments as transitional. “These units are not geared toward end users,” says Realtor Heikki Walden, a Sutton agent who has a client selling a 550-square-foot flat with an inboard bedroom at 68 Abell St., near Queen West and Dovercourt. “They’re sold to investors. The people who live here are people who live here for a year or two years. It’s cheap and cheerful.”
Mr. Walden adds one other layer to this space riddle, which is that in condos with floor-to-ceiling glazing, the areas near those big windows can be either very warm or very cold, and occupants, he says, may install black-out curtains on outboard bedrooms to blunt the temperature fluctuations, especially in west-facing units.
Still, Mr. Miro argues that architecture, as a profession, should be abiding by the principles adopted by organizations such as the American Institute for Architects (AIA), which states that good design, among other things, should promote physical, psychological and emotional well-being. “There’s an AIA grand statement about what the architecture is about,” he says, “and it’s completely thrown out the window.”
Mr. Kempster would like to see Ontario’s building code regulators eliminate the loophole that enables inboard bedrooms to rely on borrowed light via a translucent sliding door. As he puts it, “I think most people would agree that direct access to daylight is a good thing.”
Spaces defined
The Ontario Building Code specifies precise minimum floor areas for living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms, but with the caveat that if these rooms are combined, the size of those respective spaces can be reduced. The primary bedroom, for example, must be at least 9.8 square metres, but if that room is combined with, say, the living area, that minimum size for the bedroom can be pared back to 4.2 sq/m, provided there’s a 3 sq/m opening between the two.
As the Code states, “[I]f a room draws natural light and natural ventilation from another area, the opening between the two areas must be large enough to effectively provide sufficient light and air … The opening does not necessarily have to be in the form of a doorway; it may be an opening at eye level.”
This is where the notion of borrowed light comes from, says Ottawa designer Toon Dressen, president of Architects DCA. “What this all suggests is that a windowless bedroom is possible, provided there is a sufficient sized opening between the two spaces.”