This major renovation of a 1911 Toronto semi-detached home by Solares Architecture isn’t just open, modern, beautiful, and freshly insulated and upgraded. It’s also fully accessible.
In 2013, a married couple in their 50s, with two daughters in university, came to Solares asking an important request. in 2006, the husband of the household had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and was soon after in need of a personal mobility device. The family began looking into buying an accessible home, yet they are usually built-as-needed and are hard to find on the market. After assessing the costs of buying a one-storey bungalow, which would typically still need major renovation work to make truly accessible, the family decided to instead renovate the home they had owned since 1989. They came to Solares, an architecture firm specializing in sustainable architecture, who agreed with to take this major project on with a resounding yes.
The home’s front facade had been recently landscaped, with two long sets of stairs up to the porch and front door. Rather than demolish the stairs and install cumbersome mobility equipment, Solares kept the front facade in tact, and focused on making the house’s backyard into a covered garage with an accessible entrance into a huge basement, with tall 9ft ceilings, an accessible bathroom, and the husband’s “man cave”, an awesome living area plus sound editing equipment for his job in television.
Before the renovation, the house had a backyard was raised, with no laneway access, unlike the rest of the houses on the block. In order to create an at-grade entrance to the laneway, the backyard had to be fully excavated.
The original stair, previously located along the house’s party wall, was moved to a more central location, in the center of the house in a U-shaped configuration. The elevator was installed next to the stair, so on every floor, both the elevator and stair opened to the same space.
On the main floor, a large dining room attached to the front foyer is home to reclaimed wooden brackets from an old abandoned church. On the other side of the stair and elevator, a kitchen with a low counter allows for easily accessible coffee, tea, and food preparation. Following the kitchen sits a living room, with sliding doors out to the huge, 750 sq. ft. patio on the roof of the garage, equipped with full-depth garden beds and lots of south and west sunshine. On the second floor is another luxurious and large accessible bathroom, and the master bedroom, with a huge, low-lying window. Two more bedrooms, for the university-bound daughters to stay in when visiting, are located on the second floor and in the basement. The wife’s art studio makes up the entire third floor.
Our structural designer was Sharad Katakkar of Katakkar Engineering Associates Inc, and our general contractor was Kurt Schmidt from Spaces Construction. The home’s HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) was designed and installed by Paul Shrigley and Matthew Witt of Shrigley, Garcia & Associates.
