To the light house | National Post

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Reigo & Bauer’s design for an East Beach home features an off-centre roof ridge and curved overhang at the side entrance, which together give it a slightly canted verticality. According to founding principal Merike Bauer, the design is meant as a nod to the swaying mature trees that rise in the ravine at the rear. But it also gives the house a friendly, approachable feeling; it’s as if it’s leaning its elbow casually on the side fence, open to a neighbourly chat with passersby. 

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Playing with expectations is something of a stock-in-trade for the husband-and-wife partners in the Reigo & Bauer architectural firm and their team, whose portfolio leans to creative residential renovations and new builds, often in established neighbourhoods. The exterior illustrates their predilection for taking traditional conventions and tweaking them just enough to produce art, while still allowing the house to sit companionably among its neighbours.  

The home has a peaked roof and three rows of windows, corresponding to the above-ground floors of the house; there’s a built-in front garage and a normal driveway. But then things start to take off. The windows are set off-centre to each other; the roof cants to the right, instead of peaking in the centre; the garage door — and in fact the entire house, roof and all — is clad in grey diamond-patterned slate tiles.  

Of course, there’s a perfectly logical, practical purpose to each of these choices. Slate is a durable, virtually maintenance-free material; cladding the garage door in the same materials makes it disappear; the placement of the windows suits the rooms within. But the effect is striking without being jarring.  

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Like many established Toronto communities, the housing along the street varies widely, with a mix of older homes, new builds and renovations of every style and vintage. “It makes for a very interesting streetscape,” Bauer says. The unusual topography of the street, set in a valley between two rising ravine slopes, also partly inspired the design. “On one side, the ravine rises up behind the house,” she continues. “On the other, the ravine starts right at the sidewalk, so the heights of the houses on either side are different.” 

The clients inherited the property from the husband’s father, who had lived in a bungalow that formerly stood on the site. Both clients are design-savvy; the wife had grown up in France and had experience with renovating and antique-collecting since childhood. When the project was first commissioned, recalls Bauer, they were expecting their first child; by the time they moved in, their family had expanded to include two toddlers.   

They wanted a home that was modern and stylish, but practical for a young and growing family, with an abundance of light and rooms that were accessible to each other but allowed for separate activities for family members, rather than one big interior space.  

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“Homes that are fully open-plan are often hard to live in,” observes Bauer, “so we try to make spaces that are connected but have some sense of separation.” One way to do this, she says, is to start with a central volume and to “spoke” the other rooms around it.  

The front door opens to a central stack with a coat closet and powder room on its outer side, while on the other it forms part of the kitchen in the centre of the house. An L-shaped counter defines the kitchen’s other half, with openings on either side that allow free communication with the dining room at the front, and the family room facing the garden at the back. 

The kitchen cabinets are a small design pleasure in themselves. Chosen by the owners, they feature clear glass fronts and striking black cross trim, with a vaguely vintage-Gothic look; it’s like a modern take on farmhouse, or a nod to the owner’s antiquing heritage. 

Though the kitchen is an inside room, care was taken to ensure it received as much natural light as the rooms that surround it. Tall cabinets alternate with pill-shaped openings; the central one is actually a mirror. These transfer light from the windows at the front and back, and also light flowing down from skylights at the top of the house.  

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The family room features its own subtle but clever way to maximize light. Four tall, narrow windows rise to meet, then pass, the line of the ceiling. Closer examination shows that just before it reaches the back wall, the edge of the ceiling scrolls back, allowing the rear windows to soar another several feet. The ceiling detaches again at one side, producing the same light-liberating effect, this time from another tall, narrow window tucked into a jog at the front, which in the afternoon fills the room with golden, west-facing light. 

Perhaps one of the most artistically adventurous parts of the whole house is the hallway and stairs to the upstairs bedrooms, so often treated as a supporting player even in imaginatively designed houses like this one. “We’ve always found secondary-floor spaces to be a creative opportunity,” says Bauer. “Here, all those roof pitches and slanted walls really presented a chance to celebrate the space.” 

From the foot of the stairs, where the kitchen wall openings create a porthole to the rest of the floor, the staircase rises to an upper mezzanine, surrounded by bent and angled wall and ceiling planes that bounce light off the skylights. The resulting play of light and shadow creates an almost origami-like effect. Yet, just as with the rest of the house, it’s logical: the design allows the family to communicate easily from room to room. One can picture a child peeking through the opening into the kitchen or from the top of the stairs to say good night. 

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Outside, where to put the front door posed a minor puzzle, recalls Bauer. “There are three entrances into the house,” she explains. “There’s a door inside the garage to the mudroom, which the family uses the most often. There’s a side door, which is convenient for a stroller and so on. But we needed a formal front door as well, for company. We tried a few different things, and then decided to place it facing the side, since that worked with the interior and with the front elevation.”   

Because the site sloped upwards towards the ravine behind the house, it meant creating a set of steps at the side of the house. “We created this curved overhang as a shelter, but realized that if it extended all the way back over the front door, that would create too much shadow.” In the end, she says, the solution was to cut it off just before the front door (creating, in the process, two more opportunities for windows) and treat it as a wayfinder, or a form of welcome, to the entry. 

“We often find we are attracted to elements in [neighbourhood] architecture that can be imagined in new ways,” says Bauer. “What makes neighbourhoods rich are the variations — the similarities but also the differences that make them vibrant.”  

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