Toronto-based architecture and interior design studio Batay-Csorba Architects (BCA) has completed the Westminster Residence, a contemporary reimagining of the traditional Edwardian gable homes found in Toronto’s residential High Park neighborhood. Built on a corner plot, the new home “aims to provide an underlying sense of familiarity and continuity within the archetypal roof form,” says BCA. The home’s interior is concealed beneath a steep terracotta roof: “the project explores the notion of spatially occupying the underside of the roof, akin to an attic,” explains the studio.
BCA incorporated an oversized gable roof into the design of the Westminster Residence, its high-ceilings offsetting the home’s compact site. The high and steeply pitched “cathedral-like” spaces are interspersed by skylights.
On the ground floor, a large floating and covered acid-etched concrete patio sits beneath the cantilevered roof and extends onto a low-maintenance sedum garden. Above this, the primary bedroom expands into a tall roof dormer and overlooks the garden via a private balcony — the balcony is shielded behind a 20-feet-tall brise-soleil, providing the air of a shaded city courtyard.
The home is a composition of three dark-colored elements: the lower brick-clad volume, a heavy triangular stone-clad roof (this cantilevers over the east-facing covered carport and west-facing covered patio), and two tall rectilinear dormers (on the home’s eastern and western sides).
The atmospheric interior fuses a material palette of dark and light hues, moving between cavernous and light-filled spaces: darkly stained sawn walnut, heavy unfilled travertine, concrete, and darkly textured limewashed walls contrast with natural limewashed surfaces, wide plank and knotted white oak flooring, and soft furnishings and fabrics.
The residence is entered via a floating steel porch that provides a semi-private enclosure and threshold. Its placement and material composition is an extension of the home’s interior layout.
On the exterior, BCA has used a rich palette of materials that will acquire a warm patina with age, including: textured terracotta roof shingles, hand-pressed brick arranged in patterns that reflect those seen throughout the neighborhood, vertical hand-brushed wood cladding and brise-soleil, powder-coated aluminum door and window projections, raw galvanized steel, and a mix of rough and smooth cast-in-place concrete.
The concrete is used to create paving and the entry steps and retaining walls around a sunken south-facing basement courtyard.
Site: 3,490 square feet (324 square meters)
