Calming design for a frenetic world

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For something so static, architecture can do a lot of things. It can stir the soul (religious buildings), it can excite or inspire playfulness (a world’s fair or midway), or it can soothe and calm the human heart.

For calming architecture, my thoughts turn to Raymond Moriyama’s slow escalator descent into the valley at the Ontario Science Centre, the curving walls of my childhood library, S. Walter Stewart Library in East York (or almost any library for that matter), or the Grand Hall at Union Station.

And then there’s Jennifer McDonald’s house in the Yonge and St. Clair area of Toronto, by architect Kyra Clarkson and KCA’s Sheila Mathies.

Even from the sidewalk, there is something serene about the building. Maybe it’s that it goes no higher than its gabled neighbours despite having a full third storey; maybe it’s the tidy horizontal strips of kiln-treated ash and how they curve to meet the ceiling inside; perhaps it’s how all of that glazing around the front door is minimized by the charcoal-coloured fibre cement cladding and black metal.

Or maybe it’s all of that, plus the 10,000 other things a very good architect will pore over before allowing one board to be cut, or one brick to be laid.

Invited inside? Once up the third step, even the pause-and-pivot to open the front door slows a person down. Open it, and one’s foot falls on the same material, black slate (with grout lines to match) as it did outside. So, sitting on the shoe-removal bench is a transitional event – you’re not quite inside yet – until one can pad into the living room to contemplate the enormous Richard Johnson photograph of ice huts, or the curves of the orange Womb Chair, or the long, curved wall of the fireplace.

“There’s one more curve, I challenge you to find it,” Ms. Clarkson says with a laugh. But before that, this writer pauses at another piece of art: a vertically mounted flat screen television with what appears to be a distant scene of a harbourfront.

“It’s The Ship at the Bottom of the Mountain,” Ms. McDonald says. By artist Vilhelm Sundin, the nine-minute video loop, which allows clouds to skim across the mountains, ship’s lights to blink on and off, and a seaplane to buzz by, is completely mesmerizing.

But it doesn’t steal the show from the architecture nearby, such as the staircase. Surrounded by a ‘shell’ of low, white walls and white, powder-coated steel panels – with just the slimmest of gaps between them – the golden, all-wood stair and vertical slat screen is almost a surprise, like finding crystals in a geode. That’s because Ms. McDonald, an interior designer, had all surfaces painted white, chose a white marble tile for the kitchen backsplash, white cabinet doors in all areas (save for a few wooden ones in the kitchen), and Calcutta marble for “the island of my dreams.”

But when using so much white, Ms. Clarkson advises that it’s wise to create interest with texture, such as the Venetian plaster on the fireplace wall (still to come), the smoothness of kitchen and bathroom tiles, or even the cool-to-the-touch stair handrails, which are custom-designed and made from Corian.

“We had a meeting one day, and Kyra did a 3-D model in foam core of what we were talking about,” says Ms. McDonald of the handrails.

“And then I wanted your hand on it,” finishes Ms. Clarkson.

And speaking of hands, visual clutter in the kitchen is reduced by eliminating handles: “Everything is back bevelled with no pulls … very clean, as minimal as possible … and larger panels with not a whole lot of dividers.”

Another way to instill calm? Where possible, eliminate the jumble of furniture with built-ins, whether that be a book/curio shelf or via banquette seating around the dining table.

Oh, and harvest light if you can. Here, on a typical narrow Toronto lot, it’s sometimes not enough to carve big windows into the front and rear façades; for photons to penetrate into a building’s midsection and carry down into the basement, stairway skylights are a must. But one must ensure, as Ms. Clarkson has, that there are setbacks and gaps for that light to poke through (and it is here, on the third floor, that the third curve is discovered beside those skylights; it acts like a photographer’s infinity wall to carry light down).

Balconies and terraces are also a light-lover’s paradise, and Ms. Clarkson has deftly inserted one of each onto the third floor; the one that faces the street is completely invisible to passersby.

And if even more serenity is required – Ms. McDonald does have two teenagers – there is a matching garage building with a 600-sq.-ft. guest apartment above.

To achieve this level of calm, it helps if one is already familiar with the architect’s work. In this case, Ms. McDonald was lucky enough to have neighbours across the laneway who’d employed Ms. Clarkson (Ms. McDonald has owned this house since the 1990s): “My thought was to do something to this house, and what it might be, I didn’t know, so when I saw that space it was almost a no-brainer … I just loved every detail … and I said ‘I’ve got to meet her.’”

Unfortunately, while the duo hit it off in 2018, by the time the design phase was over and construction began the pandemic had hit, so what should’ve been a year of construction almost doubled to two. But that, thankfully, is now very still and calm water under the bridge.

“I think Jennifer had, and has – and you can feel it in the house – an aesthetic and an interest in beautiful, quiet materials, light, and there’s a feel that you really respond to.”