Studio VAARO

HOUSE R

Toronto, Canada

Under Construction / Completion WINTER 2023

House R is a 3-storey semi-detached house in Toronto’s “Republic of Rathnelly” neighbourhood that has undergone a full renovation and roof reconstruction. As we found it, the house was composed of a series of awkwardly proportioned spaces that had never been considered holistically. Studio VAARO was tasked with rethinking its layout as well as designing its fully custom interiors.

Throughout the house, built-in furniture and thick “walls” serve both as functional storage elements and as space-defining devices. These built-in elements play with a mix of sharp right angles and soft curves, as a means of exploring geometric alternatives to traditional and symmetrical building elements. The curves also serve to soften specific interfaces and lighting effects.

The house’s material palette is composed of concrete, wood, stone, and plaster. The new ground floor is cast-in-place concrete. Out of this solid base emerge other cast-in-place concrete elements: a curved bench in the kitchen (booth seating that replaces a traditional ‘dining’ room), the stair landing with integrated bench, and two furniture-like elements along the West wall—one a media console, the other the fireplace hearth.

The entire Eastern wall of the ground floor is thickened to contain the stair, kitchen, and other support spaces, expressed as a series of boxy volumes, and is clad in dark ‘walnut’ coloured wood. A large, pill-shaped island, constructed entirely of the same dark wood, sits in the middle of the kitchen and allows for additional seating, as does the wood bench that wraps around the living room. This wood continues up the stair to the other floors of the house, ensuring material continuity throughout.

Team: Aleris Rodgers, Francesco Valente-Gorjup, Shengjie Qiu, Liam Hall