A slender semi-detached home in Toronto’s Dovercourt Village, Active House seeks to enhance livability, functionality, and atmosphere for a busy family of four. Guided by judicious space planning, SLi led the design of this full ground-floor renovation and two-storey addition, responding to the 1,400-sf home’s compact nature as well as the client’s desire to carve out more usable space for specific functions, including well-appointed entryways and flexible work-from-home options.

Long and narrow, the rooms of the main floor were disconnected from one another both functionally and visually and offered little natural light. By removing a series of walls, retrofitting the staircase structure, and relocating the powder room, we transformed the floor’s layout to create openness between kitchen, dining, and living spaces. Stretching the entirety of the west wall, a custom millwork unit provides storage and display areas. Alongside white oak hardwood flooring, this warm, dove-coloured architecture forms a palette of serene, natural tones that establishes a visual thread connecting the rooms.

A series of gentle architectures creates clear programming in the open space. We adjusted the existing staircase to function as a natural divider between living room and dining room while maintaining sightlines from the street entrance to the backyard. A discipline around foyers, balconies, and sliding doors establishes well-lit moments of arrival in the small home. A bespoke semi-wall provides a seated entry as well as coat and shoe storage and frames an intimate living room. At the rear of the home, we conceived a rectangular addition that streamlines past renovations into a unified architecture that networks a previously disparate mudroom into the main floor, incorporating enlarged glazing to bring more light into this primary entryway.

With the new square footage, we designed a bright and airy tea room, a generous space with a full-length sliding door and juliette balcony. Amidst the home’s larger program of purpose-driven areas designed for active living, this room provides a calm space for rest, reflection, and family gathering.

The upper storey of the addition offers a dynamic work-from-home solution in the form of two autonomous work zones separated by glass bifold doors, an arrangement that allows the spaces to function as separate offices or as a unified coworking zone. In integrating the transparent wall, the inset office enjoys access to ample natural light from the south-facing balconette.

Offering newfound warmth, ease of movement, and functional capacity, our redesign unites outlying rooms through a shared architectural language. In sculpting spaces that are aware of and in tune with one another, the home achieves a distinct sense of flow, elevating smooth transitions between multipurpose spaces, each optimized for live, work, and play.