House 95

Scott Norsworthy

• Architects

House 95 is a flagship project for the Izen team. A two-year labour of love, this home is full of quiet luxury and feels thoroughly effortless - the most challenging design achievement. Achieving this was no easy task, as House 95 came to us with a pre-approved, generic, builder basic design and already-secured building permits that we needed to work within. The clients, a retired couple, wanted to downsize and gave us carte blanche to transform their 25-foot wide lot in Toronto's Bedford Park neighbourhood into their dream home. We needed to work within these tight parameters, as changing these details would result in very costly delays and months of the project being tied up with the Committee of Adjustments.

photo_credit Scott Norsworthy — Scott Norsworthy

We found every opportunity to infuse warmth and wonder into otherwise perfunctory spaces. The home now features three bedrooms, with 2,000 square feet above grade, a 1,000 square foot finished basement, and a 500 square foot sub basement featuring a theatre and bar. Our final design is the epitome of effortless luxury, infused with weightlessness, calm and ease. The use of natural materials, a warm palette, beautifully concealed functional design and an innovative application of frameless windows resulted in a home that feels more like a rural oasis than an abode in a very busy urban centre. Everything is intentional, and no detail is left undesigned. Every time a material meets another material, there's a design transition.

A key part of our approach was to infuse the interiors with as much natural sunshine as possible and showcase the vibrant surrounding tree canopy. House 95 features Toronto's first application of frameless windows, imparting a treehouse vibe throughout the space. The design of the frameless windows minimizes the casings around the glass, resulting in a near-perfect sense that the interiors flow unimpeded to outside. A particularly sublime effect was achieved from the dining room banquette. A wall of windows that wraps around a corner, creating an unobstructed view of the outdoors, making the inside room feel more like an exterior porch.

Specifying this window system was a significant feat of engineering and collaboration. Frameless windows are typically used in temperate climates and have only recently been engineered to withstand harsh Toronto winters. We had to fly in an installer from Vancouver, as no one local had installed these windows before. Since the frames are actually hidden inside the interior walls, it was critical to devise a way to wick the water away from the walls to prevent ice forming within during our freeze/thaw cycles. Trace electrical elements in the bottom of each window helped to accomplish this.

To complement the light, airy treehouse sensibility, we used white oak engineered hardwood flooring on the ceiling and polished concrete floors, heated from within, to amplify natural light. Receded black marble baseboards make walls appear to float throughout the home.

The main staircase was created with origami-thin, folding planes of white oak that appear to float from floor to floor, but are actually supported by heavy steel framing hidden within the walls. Glass rails are nestled within sleek black steel channels, which features similar black steel channels as hand-grips, avoiding the heavy, ubiquitous steel buttons seen in most contemporary homes, and maintaining the effortless design. The same sense of weightlessness can be found in the home's exterior. The lower portion of the house is wrapped in seamless, perfectly flush Neolith porcelain panels (another difficult feat of collaboration), while the upper floors are clad in a heavier Indiana limestone and cantilevered over the bottom portion. The home seems to defy gravity and imparts a sense of ease and airiness from the moment you see it.

The exterior features another material innovation: the porcelain panels have been coated with an environmentally-friendly photocatalytic surface treatment called PUREti. It is self cleaning and antimicrobial when it interacts with sunlight - it helps to purify the air around it, as well as helping to lengthen the life of the material.