Scaled Contemporary – Eurodale Developments, Richmond Hill, Ont.

Brendan Charters of Eurodale Developments discusses their total makeover of a 1990s suburban Toronto home.

Before

After

It’s about as extensive a facelift as you can possibly probably undertake while really maintaining the rest of the home behind. We had to frame walls between the front entrance to the living room and just close the back 95 percent of the house off and just completely expose this to mother nature foralmost a year. We only had a couple times when things got inside. A little bit of liquid here and there in the winter months. And of course, it always happens at like 2 a.m. on a Sunday. But largely we were able to insulate off the space from heat loss or heat gain and keep the weather out.

We stripped the roof. We’ve got standing seam metal on the main roof but we also had to tie in that new double height front entry and cut into the existing truss. We also raised the living room ceiling up to about to about 12 or 14 feet. So that room also got completely locked off with a small addition to square it up and an addition out the front to square the front up and create a little bit of space and a slight addition you can see on the on the garages to make them in line. They had that awkward little step back. They were trying to be creative and conceal the garages but you really can’t. They’re reasonably in line but they were only a few feet off. So we had very minor additions but foundation work to do all the way up just to create this straight line. We didn’t want them as dominant as three garage doors are in suburbia. We want to try to pull the eye to the front entrance where the main doors are, where you’re going to walk into the space versus where you’re going to park your car. And so that’s why we pulled that porch out and we pulled the vestibule out to make that roof line with a double-height section in the porch more dominant, visually dominant. It kind of draws your eye over to the left to focus on the front door instead of the garage doors.

We took the gable off, we we took the hip roof off that’s beside it on the side. We took the gable off that was over the living room and over the garage. We actually made it now a balcony, a private balcony, because it faces the street, so it’s got a parapet wall there. You can just see the top of the door kind of peeking out over top. So you’ve got a private patio space up there off the bedroom and and just aligned to those roof lines. So you get some strong horizontal, unified lines. And when you’ve got the grade height difference between the garages and that parapet wall and the living room wall, now you’ve got that strong, single horizontal line that comes across all unified. Above that you have the double-height ceiling in the front entry with the large window.

The skin is a cultured stone and it is from Rinox. It is a cultured stone, so it’s like a precast masonry. We went through an extensive design process where we went through colouring and stucco.

It’s a big place, 4,400 square feet. So a decent-sized space. And you’ve got the patio space that’s a couple hundred square feet on its own. It was a 1990s subdivision build. They mimicked a much older style there for sure. The coined corners and the worked trim at the soffit. It looked pre-war. There were some confused architectural elements. We cleaned it up. And the nice thing is that the neighborhood is ’90s subdivision era so it’s not like a lot of people have done this extensive of a project before and it’s quite a swing from the more traditional nature of all the homes in the area to this much more contemporary style. Surprisingly, we had so many people drive by and stop and comment on how amazing they thought the project looked. It really received a lot of good neighborhood feedback. Sometimes when you’re creating a dramatic change like this people can take offense to it or be jarred in a negative sense, but the feedback was all very positive. We would get a lot of emails and comments and calls saying, “I drove past this project you’re doing in Richmond Hill. Holy geez, I can’t believe what a change it is.” And just really positive feedback, which is fun, right? It’s nice to have.

So there was an old recessed porch under the roof there. We pulled it forward because it was recessed about six, eight feet back and we pulled it forward. I get and appreciate they wanted to make a covered entry and a concealed entry but when you look at the photo, you can’t even see the door because it’s all in the shadows. So it’s like, here’s the front door but don’t come and knock on it. It’s trying to hide it almost whereas we want that to be the most dominant feature of the home. So that’s why we pulled the porch forward, pulled the columns forward and made them more substantial, to just make it have that punch.

That’s a 10-foot-tall fibreglass door. It’s an eight-foot-tall door with a two-foot transom. So yeah, it’s, it’s tall. Pretty amazing that you’re able to build something like that, that doesn’t warp with all the engineered lumber. We’re able to do much larger stuff, but it performs so well at keeping Mother Nature at bay. And it creates an energy-efficient opening because 20, 30, 50, years ago we definitely had much smaller openings. Now the desire in the building, in the in the walls, is to have as large openings as you can. They’ve got those pin-mounted hinges, they’ve got all kinds of crazy stuff now with, with those large format doors and with the lift-and-slide technology. The neat thing is, it’s not super heavy and cumbersome to operate these things.

The roofers did the standing seam roof and the soffits. All the aluminum frame that you see around the door opening was one solid unit that was constructed. So the side transoms and the side lites and the upper transom are all one, fully custom. Because we had to meet the proportion and scale for what we had designed. So it’s, it’s definitely not an off the shelf type application.

The soffit is aluminum as well. Yeah, it looks like cedar, but it’s completely maintenance-free. The nice thing is they’re not going to have to stain it and treat it. It’s going to have that nice colour pop forever. Basically, it’s got a wood grain right in it – it does really look like natural material.

On the garage side of things, we you had to pull those trusses out. They were pre-engineered truss, so those get ripped out. And then we basically built a floor package because it’s going to be a porch. So it’s not just roof load but there’s live load that you’re designing for on the living room side where we ripped that gable off. It’s work. We created a stepped-height section and that’s just snow load, dead load, that we’re putting on the rafters there. And then we did the same at the upper level. So you’ve got that gable right over the entry that got ripped right out and we had to frame it above in order to create that. You’re basically 20 feet high when you get into that front entrance. So supporting on those existing trusses took some engineering. But over the garage and the living room we just totally did away with those existing trusses and built all new flat roof rafters.

They can come out those patio doors and be on the roof.  The parapet wall acts as a railing. You wouldn’t even see any furniture in behind there. You might see the head of a person as they walk out. That parapet wall is 42 inches above the roof deck. There really is no railing, it’s a full parapet framed wall. It’s clad on the exterior with aluminum. The black band you see is actually stucco and and then you’ve got the natural stone beneath it. Totally custom built.

This is a Duradek product. We use this for boat houses and it’s a waterproofing membrane and a finished decking membrane all together in one. We’ve got scuppers to the side so it has a slight slope that flows water over to the side and then the scuppers come through that parapet wall.