Aurelia is a house of about 100 years old in Toronto. The owners had just bought it and were about to have a baby, so the renovation had one fixed date: it had to be done before the baby came home. We designed and built a new kitchen, refinished the stair, put in a fluted fireplace surround, fixed what we found once the house was open and, halfway through, added a bathroom upstairs. The whole job took a couple of months.
The brief
A young family, a small kitchen footprint and very little time. The kitchen had to hold a lot of storage for a family with a newborn, and the house had to be finished before the baby came. In James's words on site: "We came in here really fast and really efficient."
What we found
"When you're working in 100-year-old homes, you never know what you're going to find," James says, and this house was no different. Once it was open:
- the floor was out of level across the whole main floor,
- there was water damage throughout,
- and there was knob-and-tube wiring.
All of it was upgraded and built back to our standards before the finishes went in. None of that work shows in the photos.
The stair
Older Toronto houses often have stairs that were never built to today's rules and are too steep. To update this one without replacing it, we refinished the entire surface of the stair, and dressed the side wall in new picture-frame panelling with black looped balusters on the rail.
The kitchen
Ceara's challenge was the footprint. A narrow kitchen has to give a young family storage without feeling crowded, so she leaned on drawers: hidden drawers, deep drawers and pull-outs that are easy to reach. The washer and dryer sit in a closet in the kitchen run behind matching doors.
To keep a small room from looking plain, she layered the materials. The cabinet hardware mixes satin brass pulls with honey bronze knobs. Tall cabinets have reeded glass doors. The backsplash and bar wall are a bold veined stone, and the island is a black porcelain slab with a honed leather finish, wrapped down the sides as a waterfall. She also paid close attention to where each material starts and stops, because in a small room every edge is in view.
The fireplace and the bathroom
In the living room, the fireplace has a fluted surround that runs down to the floor. Upstairs, the owners decided halfway through the job that they wanted the bathroom done too. That left a couple of weeks to design it, choose the finishes, build it and finish it before they moved in. The result has a band of white marble with dark red veining around the tub and lining the niche, glossy white tile above, and black fittings.
The handover
The job finished in time for the owners to bring their newborn home to a finished house. James told the story on camera on the day of the photo shoot, standing in the finished kitchen.
