Greenwood is a narrow brick house in Toronto's east end. We took off the top floor and built a new storey in its place, pushed the back of the house out, enlarged the basement and designed every room inside. It took 10 months from the permit application to handover, and the whole time the design and the build were run by the same two people: James on site and Ceara at Juliette Interiors.
The brief
The owners are a family of four in a house with a compact footprint. They needed more room, a primary suite of their own and a main floor that worked as one space. We took the job through the permit process, the interior design phase and construction, with a lot of back and forth between builder, designer and architect along the way.
The design problem
A narrow house leaves little room for a kitchen island, a proper dining table and storage on the same floor. Ceara's answer was to plan everything around flow. The kitchen, the island and the open stair share one run of herringbone floor, so the main floor reads as one long room. The island has a rounded end and an overhang for stools instead of a separate eating counter. The dining area is a built-in banquette with glass-front cabinets on each side. Small appliances hide behind pocket doors in a walnut-lined cabinet.
Upstairs, the clients wanted a floor that was theirs alone. The new top storey holds the primary bedroom, an ensuite that opens into a wet room under a skylight, and a den with a walkout balcony. James put it plainly on camera: "This entire floor that we're standing on didn't exist before."
How we built it
The side of the house is a double brick wall, and taking the roof off first could have left it standing on its own. So we kept the roof on, took out the floor sections one at a time and rebuilt each one, and only lifted the roof once the new floors were in. That kept the wall braced the whole way through.
The new top floor had to sit at a set height, which is why the roof lines slope down into the bedroom. The back of the house came off at the same stage, and the rear extension was framed alongside the new floors.
What we found, and what changed
Two things came up once the house was open.
First, the house had no waterproofing and no weeping tile at the footing, so nothing moved water away from the foundation, and the lot left little room to dig. Our answer was a bridged weeping system: it collects the water at the footing and carries it to a sump pump, which pumps it away from the house. It fit the tight space and gave an old foundation the drainage it never had.
Second, with the plans and the demolition in front of us, it made sense to take out a brick wall in the basement and gain floor area. That meant new engineering and an amendment to the permit, and it cost a short delay. James's view: a bigger basement adds value to the house and isn't much more expensive to build while everything is already open.
The finishes
The floor is a luxury vinyl herringbone, chosen by Ceara, who picks every finish on our jobs. As James says in the design details video, it's cost effective and durable, but it expands and contracts, so every transition to another floor is a solid wood overlap piece stained to match. The fireplace wall is lime-washed and set on mitred Taj Mahal stone, with custom doors for the TV area. By the front door, a compact foyer gets an arched opening, a pocket door and a powder room with a curved vanity finished in micro-cement. Ceara also furnished the house and fitted motorised blinds.
Watch it
The design details video walks through the floor, the fireplace and the kitchen. The finished-house video is James and Ceara in the finished house. In the homeowner's video, one of the owners explains why she hired us after a single meeting and how questions were answered through the job.
