Home of the Week: A Beaches home with both ravine and lake views

6 Fallingbrook Woods

Asking price: $2,989,000

Taxes: $11,537 (2015)

Lot size: 54.90 ft. by 141.58 ft.

Listing agent: Mark Richards, sales representative, Re/Max Hallmark Realty Ltd., brokerage

Nearly a decade ago, Teodora Pica and Jonathan Marcus used to take aspirational drives in the Beaches on the weekends.

“This area was a hidden jewel in the city,” Mr. Marcus said. “We’d say ‘This is where we are going to live one day.’”

But exactly where in the Beaches required a bit of negotiation.

He was from South Africa and wanted to live right on the beach or on the bluffs looking out over the lake. She longed for something more sheltered and wanted a home with some height, to harken back to the mountainous town of Brasov, in Romania’s Transylvania region, where she grew up.

“For me, a little bit of elevation just tells so much more of a story,” Ms. Pica said.

That’s how they came across Fallingbrook Woods, a surprisingly steep residential street nestled at the eastern-most edge of Queen Street, lined with older, manor-type homes.

Luckily for the couple, one of those old houses was up for sale about eight years ago. The original property actually included three lots, and the original home – a modern concrete dwelling built in the 1960s – was set back from the street and was very angular in its design.

When Ms. Pica walked around the original house, she realized that its angles and placement close to the crest of the hill offered spectacular views.

“Generally, all of the houses on a street face the same way and create these narrow corridors between the them,” she explained.

But the angles of 6 Fallingbrook Woods allowed it to be much more open to the streetscape, maximizing its view of the surrounding ravine and the lake down below.

So Mr. Marcus, a builder, and Ms. Pica, an architect and visual artist, decided to keep the footprint of the home and do a complete renovation instead of a teardown.

Construction started in 2013 and took two years to complete but when they were finished, the new house stood as an updated homage to its predecessor. And because one of the three lots was completely untouched in the renovation, they sold it off with plans that Ms. Pica designed for a similarly styled house.

So now the pair of houses at 4 and 6 Fallingbrook Woods are like modern birdnests peeking out the ravine.

“Every feature is functional,” Mr. Marcus said. “Even the colour blends in with the ravine, the forest, the trees.”

Incorporating a leafy setting was crucial to Ms. Pica’s design, which she crafted with architect Bill Hurst. So there are multiple windows and decks throughout the home, including three huge windows in the kitchen.

“We opened up this corner so you almost feel like you’re in the forest,” said she while gesturing out to the forest behind her. And don’t be fooled, the backyard is actually a forest, for curled up a few feet away from the kitchen windows was a deer that sat motionless.

The only clue that it wasn’t a statue was the slow machinations as it chewed on something.

The other tenet of the design was creating a contemporary look that had warmth by keeping things clean and white, but punctuating them with deep brown walnut floors and limestone feature walls.

“What we wanted was a clean, easy-to-maintain look,” Ms. Pica said. “It’s not a blank canvas but a ready-made canvas. Anybody can come in and put their own touches on it.”

The house has four bedrooms, each with ample closet space and an ensuite bathroom. One of the bedrooms is on the lower level and has its own entrance. There is also a three-car garage, a remnant they were able to keep from the original house on the lot.

Ms. Pica and Mr. Marcus can easily list off a half dozen features that make the house easy when it comes to maintenance: Corian baseboards that never need to be repainted, LED lights that will last you decades, an easy-to-wash stucco exterior. But there is one turn-key feature that trumps them all in Mr. Marcus’s opinion and that’s the heated driveway, steps and entrances to the home.

“When I first came here, I couldn’t believe that nobody had solved the problem of shovelling snow. I couldn’t understand it, people were out there breaking their backs,” he said.

But by using hydronic glycol radiant heating that relies on automated sensors, suddenly that labourious chore will no longer contribute to the seasonal affect disorder of the next owners of 6 Fallingbrook Woods.

“Here, you can sleep an extra hour rather than shovelling snow,” added Mr. Marcus with a laugh.

For Ms. Pica, her favourite room is the master bedroom, on the south end of the second floor. It’s luxuriously spacious with the sleeping area, bathroom and closet each contained in their own room. And the area with the bedroom features several large windows, allowing for light in the morning and in the evening.

But the grandeur of the room comes not just from its square footage. It also has a majestic view of Lake Ontario, which peeks through the foliage of the deciduous and coniferous trees that line the slope that the house sits on.

“The master suite is an absolute dream,” Ms. Pica said. “You’re so high up that you can be naked and nobody would know. It’s just you and the lake.”

It’s from that comfortable top-floor perch that you’re most able to appreciate the home’s integration with its surroundings. And Ms. Pica is very proud that her design blended a sense of luxury with nature.

“You always want what you do to be appreciated by others but mostly you want it to be used,” she said.