New in design: Modern family

FrankFranco Architects’ design for a sprawling Modernist house set on a wooded hill in Vaughan is an exercise in making Mies van der Rohe-style minimalism work in a family home. 

“I love researching the roots of Modernism,” says principal architect Frank Di Sarra, who names Frank Lloyd Wright and the great Italian designer-architect Carlo Scarpa — who was himself enamoured with FLW, even during the dark days of Italian fascism — as longtime heroes. “Both of them were very disciplined in their use of materials, and in the idea that houses should have a sense of how we live, not just their style.”  

In essence, the program here was fairly simple: a large, modern home that incorporated the owners’ love for entertaining, art and sculpture, and worked in harmony with its beautiful but challenging site atop a hill.  

The site, Di Sarra says, had been vacant for some time, since its unusual topography posed a challenge for building a “conventional” house. But it proved inspirational in this case. The solution, he decided, was to accommodate its grades and slopes by cantilevering some sections, and to “level out” and nestle the house into the landscape through a combination of walkways and graded terraces. 

The front elevation presents an almost monolithic face to the street, virtually devoid of windows or even a readily visible front door. A cantilevered podium extends over the terraced front lawn on the west side of the house; it forms a T with the long part of the dwelling, lined by a slatted, anodized-aluminum screen above a limestone base. 

It’s only when a visitor arrives at the guest parking area on the east side (family members park in the garage under the house) that one is invited in, along a walkway sheltered between two limestone-clad walls running parallel to the front, under the slatted screen. 

Proceed along here, and it’s suddenly quieter; instead of cars whizzing past, there’s greenery, sculpture and the sounds of birdsong and wind in the trees. The walkway turns inwards at its end and reveals a soaring two-storey glass entryway, which at night glows like a welcoming beacon. 

Inside and up one flight to the main level, the foyer acts as a fulcrum between the main hallway on the left that leads to the living area and, around a corner to the right, a winding staircase that leads into the cantilevered podium that houses the bedrooms.   

Open Everest-quartzite treads wind upwards between railings that don’t quite curve in unison. Instead, they seem to undulate, changing as one’s vantage point changes. Landings are strategically positioned to encourage a pause to savour the view both within the house and beyond, through large-scale windows facing the treed landscape behind the house. 

On the main floor, the hallway leads past the dining room, pantry and one of two wine-tasting rooms facing the street, all of which enjoy light and views but are hidden from passersby by the privacy screen. The journey ends at the inner corner of the kitchen, where the house blossoms into light: the entire rear elevation is glazed from one end to the other, including an enormous operable sliding section that opens to a maximum of some 30 feet. In summer, this engineering feat turns the house into an indoor/outdoor space more reminiscent of Palm Springs than suburban Toronto.  

Other than the kitchen, which backs onto the hallway and features a 21-foot island facing the glass door, there are no walls or recognizable boundaries in this part of the house. Instead, living and dining areas are marked by a series of casual seating groupings.   

“In a large-scale space, defining living areas comfortably becomes the objective, in contrast to a smaller urban space, where opening up and removing walls allows rooms to ‘borrow’ space from each other,” says Di Sarra. “It’s a smart solution when you don’t have a lot of space. But in a big footprint such as this, the challenge is the opposite: to retain a sense of human scale.” 

That gargantuan glass door opens onto a wide outdoor terrace, pool and lounge area, paved in the same Algonquin limestone found on inner and outer walls and walkways throughout. The east end features a covered cabana designed for changing into pool clothes, for sheltering from the weather, or simply grabbing a drink at the bar. “In summer, the family spends almost all their time out here,” he says. “You can have a big party celebrating a soccer or hockey win, and they do, without disrupting the rest of the house.” 

By contrast, one of the most cloistered parts of the house is the principal bedroom set in the cantilevered podium, whose entire rear wall is fully glazed and overlooks the leafy view. In a small but charming flourish, the edges of the floor and ceiling are recessed, so that from inside, the room seems to “float” in the landscape. 

The house poses and then resolves a number of technical questions, and one human one. How do you make a large house on a hill above a community road feel quiet and intimate? How do you accommodate public and private areas logically and intuitively? How do you solve self-imposed engineering puzzles, such as the sliding glass door? And how do you do all this while making the house comfortable and relaxed for human beings to live in? 

“I’ve worked on this project for a long time,” Di Sarra says, almost wistfully, of a contract that took more than two years to complete. “It’s a disciplined, well-thought-out space, from end to end.”