A curvy addition to East York, Toronto house turns heads

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Silver Creek Developments owner Sebastian Lenart feels quite the attachment to a certain east-west thoroughfare in Toronto’s east end. Standing in client Mike Blois’s backyard, he points to a house. “There’s a top-up that we did, a bungalow. … It’s a blue house covered in Hardie [board]; and then the other additions we did you can see them as you drive down the street.”

“You did Anne’s kitchen next door,” Mr. Blois reminds him. “A couple doors down, Bill and Stephanie, and others. So, we’d seen them around, and their signs.”

In fact, Mr. Lenart has worked on so many 1920s and 30s bungalows in the former borough of East York, Mr. Blois, an architect, felt confident hiring him after designing an addition for his own house two years ago.

He and wife Lisa, an interior designer, had been thinking about an extension from Day 1, when they’d first purchased as a childless couple 10 years ago: “When we came to look at the house, we walked up the stairs and there was a tiny little window at the top, and you could see the roof of the kitchen, and, you know, everything was small, and we thought, ‘you know, one day…’” he remembers.

That day arrived when their second child came into the world five years ago. At that point, the pair “tinkered” with designs, and since the house was a semi-detached, they’d approached the neighbours about a dual build, since two can build cheaper than one.

But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which, understandably, put a pin in things. And the prices of everything, especially lumber, went through the roof. “I think you actually quoted on a version of the design pre-COVID,” Mr. Blois says to Mr. Lenart, “and then we eventually came back to it, but, yeah, comparing those two quotes was not fun.”

Mike and Lisa Blois’ newly minted addition, however, is tons of fun. Curvy, white, layered and cantilevered, it’s a breath of fresh, crisp air in a sea of boring, black, glass-box add-ons that have dominated residential real estate for the past quarter-century. And it came in at a still reasonable $400,000.

But because the Blois residence is two backyards in from that certain east-west thoroughfare, the addition is on view to a great many. For that reason – and also because architects and interior designers are understandably fastidious – it had to look good. So, the decision was made to use white Hardie board, but applied vertically and shiplapped. That, says Mr. Blois, gave the addition a familiar look and also made his soft corners possible: “The whole idea was to have these curves, the whole thing kind of flowing out from the old building; so we were looking for ways to go around a tight curve, and I just didn’t want to do it in metal, I felt it would be not in keeping with the neighbourhood – I tried to keep the same kind of proportion that you see around, but use it in a different way.”

It also helps that the street façade was left untouched (save for new windows) and, inside, the couple made an extra effort to save the few heritage bits-and-bobs that remained. Step inside the front door and a little bit of 1930s reeded glass divides the foyer from the formal living room and, while there is new flooring underfoot (after correcting a big sag), the swirly 1970s plaster ceiling remains. Original plaster moulding makes a few appearances as well.

Walk further and the new kitchen beckons … but not so much that it grabs all the attention. No, through the use of similar tones in flooring, eschewing upper cabinets and positioning the lower cabinets to left and right, the eye line is straight to the backyard greenery. Enter the kitchen and only then will the first-time visitor realize there are a few steps down to a small mud room/office and the back door. The visitor will also appreciate that the curves on the outside walls appear in here as well. Even on the baseboard.

“We experimented a lot,” Mr. Blois says with a laugh. He adds that he and his family were able to live in the house during construction.

“At one point we had a site-built steam oven,” says Mr. Lenart. “We actually got different types of wood and experimented with which ones would create a soft radius.”

Upstairs, the five-year-old and the seven-year-old now enjoy separate bedrooms in the original part of the house, while mom and dad spread out in the new primary bedroom, which is wider than the kitchen below due to a little bit of cantilevering. Over the bed is a clerestory offering a peekaboo of leaves; on the rear wall a slot window framing a section of a neighbouring brick wall.

Pushing in the ground-floor kitchen and cantilevering the bedroom, says Mr. Blois, came about because of a desire to keep an eye on the children if they were playing in the backyard. “We did, probably, 50 different versions of this design before we went for it,” he laughs. “Because the ground floor is up about five steps or so, [in the old kitchen] you used to come out the side, on a deck, and then you had even less space to pass by, so all the versions we were trying were, how do you get from there, straight out the back, without have a lot of steps taking up all the space.”

Now, to see the kids, all it takes is a turn of the neck.

Speaking of which, when driving or walking down a certain portion of that certain east-west thoroughfare in East York, expect a lot of rubbernecking.