Snider House, an 1828 heritage property and North Toronto’s oldest surviving structure, was originally constructed as a brick Regency Cottage farmhouse at the heart of sprawling pastures and orchards. Over the next 180 years, the surrounding land was redeveloped and the home was expanded and modified – changes that saw its porch lost and the interior subdivided to serve a variety of occupants. In 1979, the property was designated under the Ontario Heritage Act for architectural and historical reasons. Our client, Jody Cash, a glass manufacturer, asked us to thoughtfully honour the building’s heritage while also reviving it as a functional home for his young family. This required an innovative design to participate in an architectural dialogue between past and present, and a strategy for contrasting the house’s historical solidity with more fluid contemporary design innovations. 

The project began by clearing the hodgepodge of recent additions, reinforcing the house’s structure, and reconstructing or reinterpreting key exterior elements such as the masonry, roof, front door, and porches. We also bolstered the building’s envelope with high-performance windows, and effective insulation and ventilation.

Since there was nothing salvageable from the original interior, we leaned into an appreciation of imagined original spaces. We stayed true to the home’s formal centre-hall plan, now flanked by a living room – in which we reinstated an existing wood-burning fireplace – and a generous dining room (created by combining the former parlor and dining room) that terminates with a floating service and coffee bar wrapped in smoked mirror. As the interior progresses to a new rear addition and backyard, the design releases from formal symmetry and solidity towards a loose and immaterial flowing veil. Glass was a foundational material – both as a contrast to the masonry, and to introduce a signature for Cash – with an undulating glass facade establishing the building’s new rear perimeter and immersion into a newly constructed landscape.

Although designed to be ephemeral, the ‘glass veil’ provides the necessary weight to define a new enduring character – one that brings the house into its next generation. The new kitchen and family room invite casual conviviality. Contemporary interventions and sartorial linings assume the lightness of the new sinuous geometry of the glass addition, which now weaves through the heavy masonry walls and order of the historic structure. On the ground floor, the historic spaces are rendered in white, and the new addition gives way to earthy colours, which comforts, adds interest, and draws nature indoors. Materials are soft and inviting: pebble grey marble and back-painted glass cabinets meet walnut millwork in the kitchen; in the family room, deep blue felt wallcoverings, a built-in blue leather bench and wrapped leather shelving buffer acoustics. Blue and green reveals add subtle, crafted accents. A custom-designed, powder-coated chandelier floats over the kitchen like a scarf in the wind. And tall, solid baseboards at thickened walls with heavy Corian surrounds in the original spaces give way to wide, flattened chromed ones in the addition, their horizontal register flush with the oak floor. 

At the centre of the home, the staircase is a key feature, rising from the basement to the second storey with continuous seven-degree powder-coated pickets. Leather-wrapped newel posts invite tactility where it matters most. The second-floor hallway is an undulating expression of light and plaster, where the walls and balustrade appear to have delaminated from their stark positions as though flagging in a breeze flowing from the glazed transom and reconstructed side lit door.

In keeping with the symmetry of the ground floor, the front bedrooms maintain the order of the original design, while the principal bedroom suite, occupying the new addition, unspools like a ribbon. Its radii create a sense of both discovery and privacy. Flooring materials and inlaid patterns in mosaic and stone are designed to seep towards the bathroom, where the tub and shower are both sheltered within curvilinear walls, and floating in the leafy treetops. 

In the unconventional backyard, a deck and raised swimming pool sit level with the house’s ground floor, and the dining and lounging areas feel “carved” into the spaces below. This unique design was determined as much for its environmental impact (to forego excavation for the pool) as much as to create engaging and expansive experiences within the relatively tight space.