This is how to update a home and keep the 1950s vibe

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At the risk of sounding dogmatic, this is how to do mid-century modern.

It’s how to respect an original, sexagenarian, asymmetrical roofline and keep the focus on the original buff brick façade by sensitively placing two additions – one visible from the street and the other only to the birds and squirrels in the ravine – that augment rather than detract from the building’s dignity.

The purveyors of this architectural finery are husband-and-wife architects Maria Denegri and Tom Bessai (Denegri Bessai Studio), who began making a subtle mark on the Toronto landscape in 2008 after working in Vancouver, Barcelona and Los Angeles – all while quietly winning awards along the way.

Standing near the front door of Adi and Tania Grinberg’s North York house, there is a sense of architectural quiet, too, since the second-storey addition cannot be gleaned; all the eye drinks in is the swanky, late-1950s vibe. One has to walk south, down the driveway, for the addition to reveal itself: a peaked, thin bridge that perches, bird-like, across the span of the original roof.

“We pushed our addition way back and it mirrors the exact profile of this house but it does it in a simple way,” Mr. Bessai says. “No overhangs, just a very simple little parapet in a darker colour. … If it was a foggy day, you wouldn’t really see [it] at all, but you would start to notice that there was this profile that echoes the main house somewhere back there.

“I used to live in B.C. and I’d take the ferry and you’d see the mountains, and beyond that, there’s another sketch-line of mountains. … In Chinese paintings the landscape is represented through tonal variation until by the end, [the mountains] just disappear.”

No worry of this house disappearing, since it’s too full of life (the Grinbergs have three children) and has an almost ethereal, electric connection to nature.

The first, and most glorious connection – the massive curtain wall of glass that quite literally turns this house into a forest ranger lookout tower – hadn’t been conceived of in the 1950s, however. Punched windows, a skylight, and what seemed to be a “veranda” extension with “a low roof,” says Mr. Bessai, were what greeted the architects during their first walkthrough in December, 2020. And despite the exterior gable, the living room, incredulously, had a dropped ceiling.

“So, really, the big job was just, with our structural engineers, to open everything up,” says Mr. Bessai.

But not too open: to keep some spatial secrets from the first-time visitor, there is a lowered ceiling over the dining area that contains a wide, angular skylight tunnel (that also contains a little second-storey bridge), and further on, a slatted Douglas fir screen that conceals a slice of the verdant view.

The eye is also drawn to a second connector to nature, but this one relates to Ms. Grinberg’s Mexican heritage. A stand-alone, monolithic wall between the living space and informal dining area that looks as if it should contain a fireplace instead sports a checkerboard of earthy tiles in gentle shades of taupe, terracotta, and grey; some tiles poke out to support overflowing plant-pots. And while Mr. Bessai explains that the wall was necessary to hide a big, fat structural column that holds the roof up, the idea of the tiles came from Ms. Grinberg.

“The tile person is my best friend, we’ve known each other since we were in fourth grade,” says Ms. Grinberg about the TATA Mosaicos. “Basically, that is compact earth from Oaxaca, Mexico. … It’s completely eco-friendly, they’re handmade. … She’s doing a Louis Vuitton store in Mexico.

“I have my piece of earth from Mexico, literally, in my home,” she says. And the cost of fabrication and transport wasn’t ridiculous: less than $10,000.

And once fingers have stroked those tiles (you know you want to!) and eyes have given up on counting the leaves outside, the feet might carry one to the kitchen, which sits under the low portion of the roof. But, with the addition of clerestories above the cabinets and a white-on-white materials palette, it’s anything but dark.

Beside the kitchen, strangely, there had been an open courtyard similar to those found in California’s Eichler houses. Combine the unpredictable Canadian climate with the fact that this one faced the wall of the neighbouring house, and the decision was made to close it to create an enormous mud room with benches, cubbies, coat hooks, a rubber floor and a sink for future dog washing.

And while the primary bedroom is notable for the little balcony made possible by the new, projecting curtain wall and swoon-worthy bathtub that seems to sit under the trees, the architecture aficionado will likely want to trot upstairs to the bridge, which contains children’s bedrooms and ensuites. And while the floors aren’t slanty funhouse types, the windows sport some strange shapes (figuring out blinds was a challenge).

“So, the dining room space has a flat ceiling because it’s the floor of this,” Mr. Bessai says with a smile. “And the other thing that you start to realize is that the pitches of the two sides of the roof are quite different … everything is slightly asymmetrical, so, trying to embrace that and work through it.”

In one of the children’s bedrooms, the north and south windows line up to make one feel they are swinging in a giant architectural hammock. “You really look right through the room,” Mr. Bessai says with a laugh. Multiple skylights in the hallway continue the sightlines in all sorts of directions.

But despite all of this transparency, here is a renovation/reimagination by architects DB Studio and contractor DJP Homes that’s as solid an example of MCM respect as any you’ll find in the GTA. And it’s one that homeowners in similar neighbourhoods, such as Don Mills, should put on their Pinterest board.