Residential Renovation
Toronto, Canada | Completed 2023

Photographer: Doublespace Photography
Kitchen Millwork: Obumex

Architizer A+ Award Finalist, Residential Interiors, 2024
2nd Place - Contemporary Kitchens, 2022-2023 KDC Awards

North Drive House is an extensive interior renovation of a single-family home located on a lush 2-acre lot in Toronto. The owners tasked Reflect Architecture principal Trevor Wallace with updating the property—one of the owners’ childhood homes—for a new era of family life. Following stints living abroad and in Toronto’s downtown, the owners were lured back to the family’s ravine-front property nearly six years ago. The house and its traditionally-inspired interiors, however, were misaligned with their sensibilities.

Completed in late 2023, the renovation explores a compelling architectural tension: the couple’s desire for an environment that displays their extensive art collection, which includes works by the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Erik Madigan Heck, while simultaneously tending to the needs of their young family. The house is now defined by what Wallace refers to as a “playful sophistication,” balancing gallery-like spareness with moments of levity and surprise.

Reflect Architecture opted to maintain key elements of the house’s layout and circulation, relying instead on considered material and colour choices, along with the use of form, to realize the owners’ vision for the family home. The house’s gallery-like ambitions are most apparent in select living spaces, hallways, and corridors. All-white walls evoke the simple spareness of contemporary gallery surfaces; doors and entryways are designed flush with adjacent walls—only interrupted by chunky blue Tom Dixon-designed door handles—to conceal their function and redirect attention towards the house’s art.

The house avoids a sense of stiffness or self-seriousness through its playful use of shape and form. A highlight is the introduction of a sculptural white staircase in the building’s core. Riffing on the grand staircases of historic homes, Reflect Architecture’s design moves away from both tradition and sterile minimalism, with its uniquely jagged and stepped layering. This approach is echoed in the living room, where a rippling, wave-like fireplace designed by Brooklyn-based Leyden Lewis introduces a softer, more fluid counterpoint to the home’s otherwise restrained palette.

Cooking, eating, and family-focused spaces reject gallery-like spareness, instead using deep colours and considered detailing to establish warmth and intimacy. The house’s dining room, for example, contrasts the house’s all-white spaces with deep blue-green walls, mullioned windows, and a knotted light fixture by Lindsey Adelman, which hangs over the room’s large dining table.

The kitchen balances existing architecture with new interventions. Reflect Architecture introduced an Obumex kitchen with tone-on-tone travertine cabinetry and surfaces, including a new 15-foot kitchen island, while preserving successful elements of previous renovations. An existing gabled skylight that washes the room in natural light has been maintained, with its copper beams now updated to complement the travertine. At the kitchen’s far end, a large dining table designed by local furniture designer Mary Ratcliffe sits beneath a large Japanese maple tree in the backyard.