How a dryer fire became the catalyst for a house-wide rethink in this Roncesvalles home

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You have more space in your space than you think. Yes, you, over there in that downtown Victorian semi-detached. You just haven’t found the right person to chisel it out.

Architect Francesco Martire and interior designer Nadia Cannataro, co-founders of large [medium] design office, found Mary Smith, her wife and their two children gobs and gobs of space. And, while they were at it, they found them ceiling height and more natural light. And they even managed to insert a wonderful, sculptural staircase to tie it all together.

It’s too bad the catalyst was a fire in 2019.

“It was a dryer fire,” Ms. Smith confirms. “It was pretty bad … not as much fire damage as smoke damage, which, I had no idea, gets into everything; all of our furniture, up the walls.”

Luckily, Mr. Martire and his wife, Ms. Cannataro, send their kids to the same Montessori school as Ms. Smith, and the two families had already logged hours of architectural discussions while standing in the playground. “And so, when this happened,” Mr. Martire says, picking up the story, “they started thinking about potentially renovating and parlaying the insurance money into something, perhaps, a bit larger … they gave Nadia a call and went out for coffee.”

That coffee turned into all sorts of architectural ideas, which turned into meetings. When COVID-19 hit, the meetings went virtual. Then, the plans, which called for a fully open main floor, an underpinned (and therefore livable) basement, two kid’s bedrooms and a den on the second floor and “a nice [adult] oasis on the third floor,” Ms. Smith says.

However, with a Roncesvalles-area façade as gorgeous as this one, Mr. Martire and Ms. Cannataro decided to tread lightly with their street-facing interventions. While windows are modern and energy-efficient, the couple took great pains to have the original stained glass transom windows restored – including the one over the front door that contains the street number – by Toronto’s EGD Glass Studio and then boxed and placed behind new windows.

“They were in really rough shape, so even just to get them out in one piece was a bit of a challenge,” Mr. Martire says.

Step inside on sunny days, and those transoms produce glowing blobs of blue and red that dance before one’s eyes. But, despite their beauty, all eyes will likely land on that staircase: Not only does it have thick, curved, sculptural walls, as one approaches it (as a moth to flame), it reveals an M.C. Escher-like quality – the underside is finished exactly as the usable treads and risers – that, when combined with the increasing number of swoops and curves in the drywall, can be a little disorienting … but in a good way. As the first-time visitor climbs it, they’ll encounter space-saving winders and newly exposed brick framed by more delicious, swoopy bits.

But let’s stay on the main floor for now. Here, the front room sparkles thanks to ribbed ceramic tile (which took six months to arrive) over the blackened steel gas fireplace; space was found in the wall to add some custom shelves on one side and a seating nook in the other. Following the cozy dining area in the middle is an all-white, custom-drawn kitchen, which large [medium] design office handed to Rosedale Kitchens to fabricate. The back wall, which had a “peep hole” for a window, had also been parged to death on the outside, so, since there was “nothing salvageable from a Victorian perspective,” it was knocked down and replaced, Mr. Martire says.

Up on the second floor, one finds two cheery children’s rooms with space-saving built-ins, a washroom and a den with a sliding wall that can cut if off completely from the rest of the house. It’s here, at the intersection of den and third floor stair, that things get interesting: “I couldn’t get it to work in one run,” Mr. Martire says of the stair, “this, then, started to be part of the choreography to have this opened up a little to get some more light from that window up there – otherwise we’re in a fairly dark zone.” It’s true, with the sliding wall open, a parent on the third floor can still feel a big connection to the second floor, which means eyes and ears can be kept on little ones while in their bedrooms.

Walk into the adult’s bedroom, and reclaimed space makes itself known through a triangular volume over the window, a wall of storage where a knee wall had been and an ensuite large enough to slip a sculptural tub under a skylight. To keep light bouncing around, tile is white and floors are light terrazzo tile.

“Everything is just echoing of the roof planes outside … we did have to introduce a new piece of structure because we were getting rid of the collar ties that used to be down lower,” Mr. Martire says.

However, with the aesthetic choice of “pulling” the dormer shape well into the middle of the primary bedroom’s ceiling, a light-and-shadow show has been created using nothing more than simple drywall. And, again, space for inset shelving was found where an old chimney flue had been.

Space. It’s usually achieved with expensive additions. But choose an architect and interior designer who are as skilled with a scalpel as they are with a technical pen, and be prepared to welcome cubbies, cupboards, cutaways filled with light, staircases that are sculpture, shelving aplenty and, best of all, a sense of well-being as never before into one’s domestic life.

“We’re so happy, and the kids love the space,” Ms. Smith finishes. “It’s worth every penny.”