Toronto Leslieville Lofthouses | ?m | 4s | Urban Fabric | George Popper

Hey, UD, are you writing for the Globe now? ;)

Novel twists on living space in Leslieville

JOHN BENTLEY MAYS

Published Thursday, Jul. 04, 2013 12:11PM EDT

Last updated Thursday, Jul. 04, 2013 12:21PM EDT

The small residential building – bigger than a single-family home, not so grand as a tower – has an important role to play in the ongoing, necessary job of intensifying the world’s cities. Here in Toronto, to name one urban centre with density on its mind, we’ve recently seen a welcome surge in the number of mid-rise condominium blocks being proposed for old districts, some of them architecturally better than just good enough. The effective ones, in fact, occasionally embody ingenuity of the kind that’s too often missing from Hogtown’s shiny new highrises.

Take, for example, the four-storey project called Leslieville Lofthouses, on a quiet corner in an elderly neighbourhood near the intersection of Carlaw Avenue and Queen Street East.

Designed and developed by Toronto architect George Popper, and now nearly complete, this attractive little building has a very modest exterior.

Large, regularly spaced rectangular openings punctuate the unadorned brown brick walls of the lower three storeys, bringing the structure’s external appearance into line with the factories and warehouses nearby.

But the reference to industrial facades in the area is not timidly imitative. Rather, Mr. Popper has drawn on the good things about those rugged, workaday buildings from yesteryear – their simple, squared-off geometry, their no-nonsense practicality – then honoured such qualities in a plain and forthright modernist scheme.

It is certainly unlike any of the two-storey houses round about, but the contrast between modern and traditional on the streetscape is not jarring.

For the record: The building contains nine ample four-storey residential units, ranging in area from slightly more than 1,000 square feet to 1,700 square feet, and two small commercial spaces that are accessible from the street. Investors or end-users have already bought up all the apartments, though a two-bedroom suite, the architect told me, is currently on the resale market for about $540,000.

While I like the street-side presence of Leslie Lofthouses, the more interesting aspect of the complex, to my mind, has to do with what happens inside. It’s in there that Mr. Popper has unleashed a little of the urban imagination we should be looking for in all mid-rise projects.

Here, for instance, is a way to provide off-street parking that doesn’t make a decent downtown Toronto street look like suburbia.

Most suites come with parking, which has been carved out of the units’ ground floors. But instead of giving every oversized garage a separate entrance – thereby cluttering up the façade with big, unsightly folding doors – Mr. Popper has routed the traffic through a single portal and along an interior corridor leading to the individual units. It’s a neat, aesthetically pleasing solution to the problem of where (other than underground) to put the cars in a small building: You take them home.

Every garage is lit by a large, bright window facing a walkway or street.

This will make it easy for home-owners without cars to transform their parking spot into a well-lit workshop, studio or gym – a place, that is, with the knockabout informality of a basement, but without a basement’s customary gloom.

More unusual than the parking facility, however, is the divvying up of territory in the apartments proper, which takes the old modernist notion of the “open plan†farther than I’m used to seeing it go.

One enters a typical three-bedroom or two-bedroom unit through a robust front door into a corridor that opens, off to the side, into the garage, and, straight ahead, to the staircase that takes the visitor up to the spacious main “living†level of the house.

The open plan on this floor is conventional, with a kitchen area at the rear and plenty of room for a dining table and a living room ensemble closer to the big, industrial-strength front window.

Continue up the staircase to the third and fourth levels, however, and you find yourself among the bedrooms, which hardly fit the routine condo mould.

In a three-bedroom layout I visited, the only one of the three that could be definitely shut off from the rest of the apartment was the master bedroom suite, on the third floor. Another bedroom, also on the third storey, was a sky-lit, double-height space open at the top to a fourth-floor loft that overlooked it.

This is clearly not a home for people (like most of us, I suspect) who want all our bedrooms firmly separated from each other. This is perhaps not a home for families of any sort.

But singles or couples who appreciate free spatial flow, and who welcome the intimacy such a configuration invites – or who just like the idea of living in places that aren’t ordinary – will probably admire Mr. Popper’s fresh reinterpretation of the condo suite as much as I do.



http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/home-and-garden/architecture/novel-twists-on-living-space-in-leslieville/article12986197/

I like how this was positioned as innovative, when it was just cheap... they could have dug a level down. I was in the unit that's still for sale... the layout is weird, finishings are way cheap, and the ground level parking spots are weird.
 
If you want a city of midrises, Get used to wood structures. developers are pushing for the Code to allow 6 floor wooden buildings ( you can currently only build up to 4), which would mean that midrises would be much cheaper to construct, and therefor more economically viable. And truthfully, I hope it happens.
 
I like how this was positioned as innovative, when it was just cheap... they could have dug a level down. I was in the unit that's still for sale... the layout is weird, finishings are way cheap, and the ground level parking spots are weird.

Underground parking for 7 cars? OK.
 
23 August 2013: In the shade the brick looks boring but in the sun it looks great--what's up?
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I wonder how you get a car into those garages: Smart Cars only?
 
like the design hate the color....maybe they should have softened the cold window frames with a bit of colour.
 
If you want a city of midrises, Get used to wood structures. developers are pushing for the Code to allow 6 floor wooden buildings ( you can currently only build up to 4), which would mean that midrises would be much cheaper to construct, and therefor more economically viable. And truthfully, I hope it happens.

I've always wondered, are wooden building built to last? They don't seem as robust as concrete or brick buildings.
 
I wonder how you get a car into those garages: Smart Cars only?

It's tight, but my neighbor gets a motorcycle and full-size sedan in his. I parked a Hyundai Santa Fe SUV in mine last weekend (had to reverse in from the street to avoid a 50-point turn in the garage, mind you).
 
If you want a city of midrises, Get used to wood structures. developers are pushing for the Code to allow 6 floor wooden buildings ( you can currently only build up to 4), which would mean that midrises would be much cheaper to construct, and therefor more economically viable. And truthfully, I hope it happens.

I'm not a developer or a civil engineer, but what about small-scale steel frame buildings? They seem to be easy and cheap to erect; they certainly seem easier and cheaper to build than reinforced concrete. Also, what about houses made from cinder blocks?
 
I hate the prospect of more wooden buildings. Wood is vulnerable to fire, decay from water damage, and insects like termites. Even if the fire code makes fires less likely, fires will destroy dozens of homes at a time at some point within a century of construction. A modern city should be less vulnerable than that. Wood makes for inferior city building.
 
I hate the prospect of more wooden buildings. Wood is vulnerable to fire, decay from water damage, and insects like termites. Even if the fire code makes fires less likely, fires will destroy dozens of homes at a time at some point within a century of construction. A modern city should be less vulnerable than that. Wood makes for inferior city building.

You are aware that many of the 100 year old warehouses in the Entertainment District are wood framed right? No reason you can't build for longer term using wood.
 
You are aware that many of the 100 year old warehouses in the Entertainment District are wood framed right? No reason you can't build for longer term using wood.

but aren't those warehouses built with old growth trees which have tighter grain and denser?
lots of the newer construction are made from OSB, compressed wood by-products etc.
 
but aren't those warehouses built with old growth trees which have tighter grain and denser?
lots of the newer construction are made from OSB, compressed wood by-products etc.
I'm no expert but I think they still use solid wood for at least the framing part of buildings.
 
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