THE VALUE OF DIFFERENCE
It’s a delicate dance trying to balance comfort and money in a house. It’s been a recurring question for as long as Jan and I have been together. In 1986, our young family, Jan, Erin (5), Mark (2) and I needed a house. We wanted to buy the semidetached Toronto house that we were living in for $85,000. The monthly mortgage payment would have been the same as our rent. There was just one problem. As an architecture grad, just out of school, working in an architectural office, I just didn’t make enough money. So our bank turned us down flat!
I come from a family of builders. My father, the son of depression era parents, did what many Canadians did prior to the Second World War. He built. Take a walk in any neighbour in Ontario dating from the late 1800s to the 1940s and you’ll see examples of homes from humble to grand and everything in between, all built by people for their own families. But since the ‘50s most people just haven’t had the opportunity to build for themselves. They have had to settle for tailor-made homes. My grandfather used to compare this to buying cigarettes instead of rolling your own.
So with a little money from my Grandmother, I followed my heritage and built a house.
My first experiment in home creation was financially unorthodox. Time was of the essence, so I settled on a leftover lot on Toronto’s Riverdale Avenue that was generally unsuitable for any sort of building, especially a house. But the lot vendor agreed to take back a mortgage with no interim payments until the term was due. There was no time for the usual committee of adjustment application process. I was allowed, as of right, a floor space of 1,496 sq. ft. within a volume of 13’-6” wide x 40’ long x 30’ high. I interrogated Jan relentlessly to gain deeper insight into our needs and form a program. It all fit neatly into about 1,500 sq.
In exchange for meeting all our programmatic needs. Jan allowed me to explore architectural language that resulted in something that approached my idea of art. With my limited experience and knowledge gained from my mentors, in a multitude of design and building techniques, I was uniquely positioned to guide our family along a trail of dead ends, but to finally bring it off in a captivating design.
A few months, three mortgages, and no real money later, we were settled in Riverdale. The house was certainly unique. The more experienced architects of the firms that I worked for had tried to talk me out of the design. They all said the same thing: “It’s too unusual. It’ll never sell.” But after all that, it was ours, and it suited our young family needs like a hand in a very comfortable driving glove. It was featured in the Toronto Star, Homes Section as an “eccentric abode.” Jan found it very comfortable and has often compared it to every house we have lived in since, with the words, “Why couldn’t the warmth of the rooms be more like the odd blue crinkle cut French fry a house in Riverdale.” My daughter, after 40 years, still talks about the comfy sanctuary of her youth.
To many Canadians, houses are their biggest piggy banks. That fact makes them shy and willing to accept unexciting cookie-cutter homes to protect their investment. We built that first house for ourselves to suit our own particular needs and to show off my design sense. It certainly didn’t suit everyone’s tastes and requirements, but three years later, in 1990, it was sold for more money than we could have imagined—enough for me to purchase an established architectural firm in Guelph.
Our Riverdale lifestyle and unique home gave way to a small 1950s bungalow in a quiet college town, where we lived for the next 13 years. My children were able to walk to public school, middle school and high school. Everything was within an easy walk from home: Jan’s work, two groceries stores and all the services we needed. It was an anonymous little home and based on our financial choices we adapted to it rather than the other way around.
Like many sole practicing architects in the 1990s I stood on the edge of a cliff and struggled not to fall off. But at the change of the millennium, my practice life changed too, and we were ready for another grand experiment. Once again, I questioned Jan incessantly to understand her needs. We still had no real money to speak of, so we employed another tried-and-true approach to building when you have no money: Run like hell and stay one step ahead of the creditors, which is just what we did. My house/studio was built and ready to move into in just 90 days.
It was very much like a small commercial building, with three floors of welded steel frame, infilled with wood floors and capped by a structural insulated panel roof. The biggest benefit of steel frame was that we could have floor to ceiling glass on three sides on the main floor. The house was held in a cradle of a 130-year-old limestone ruin, so to me and all the passersby, it was a study in contrasts between crisp clean steel and glass and rough but durable stone.
I think I was the most comfortable there. The inclusion of the studio made my life complete. The whole house fit comfortably like a pair of silk pajamas. It was in downtown Guelph within a very walkable neighbourhood on a prominent street. Sitting in my studio open to two streets was like swimming in a stream of city life. Friends and clients would pass, see me through the glass, and just drop in. The house portion, screened by the studio, felt much more private. Jan’s sanctuary was up in her loft, where she could see but not be seen. My university-aged children each had their own bedroom/warehouse with individual entrances—an important consideration for them, as they left home, returned and left again. Of course, it didn’t hurt me that the house was known, published and identified as mine.
Houses can feel like a sanctuary and can comfort you from the winds of winter, but they can’t protect you from everything. Unfortunately, I had my first symptoms when I was building that house, then five years later I was diagnosed with MS. Eight years after that, I had a major relapse and the prospect of living in a three-level house became untenable. Again, equity had accumulated and our house became our future retirement fund. We moved into a two-and-a-half-bedroom apartment, also within a very walkable, but much more suburban, neighbourhood. It’s where we live now, within a very comfortable, unified set of rooms. Fortunately, my MS went into remission, and I was able to return to work.
Part of my current sense of sanctuary has more to do with how technology has changed my life. I now run a virtual practice and during Covid, like everyone else, I saw no one except by Zoom. Jan is out every day with our grandkids, so we don’t argue about the practice life that I have built and my loud telephone voice. While I’m very comfortable, Jan often talks about moving. The one thing she laments most is the loss of her swimming pool, at the Glass House, where she could float aimlessly at any time of the day or night and for many months of the year.
How can I sum up my understanding of the dichotomy between asset and sanctuary? I’ve had more opportunities than most to ponder the question. I don’t have an answer other than: All houses can be comfortable and affordable depending on how you shape them or adapt to them. A home is an investment, but it’s not just a monetary investment. More important than financial growth is the growth of a family, a career and life experience. Then there are the effects of change. As my dear departed mentor Brian O’Halloran used to say, as he poked and prodded me during the creation of the design for the Blue House, “There is nothing more permanent than change.”