World-Class Art Meets Luxurious Living in This Toronto Home

For a house in Toronto, designer Diego Burdi of Burdifilek bridged intimate spaces with expansive rooms appropriate for hosting large events. Brought on to bring a contemporary sensibility to the 25,000-square-foot house, Burdi mixed luxurious materials with world-class artwork and dramatic custom touches. He brought a bold vision to the project while carefully considering the family’s proclivities and needs.

Entertaining spaces include a grand room, dining room, and solarium. The material palette in these rooms is masterfully restrained, but conversation pieces abound. Artworks by Donald Judd and other 20th-century masters add fields of color and pops of pattern. (They were sourced on trips taken with the clients to London, Paris, and New York.) Walls are clad in cashmere and silk, and 14-foot-high door frames are wrapped in blackened bronze.

Behind the Design of an Art-Filled Toronto Home

This London Apartment for a Famous Singer Nods to Idol, David Bowie

When a famous British singer bought a pad in a Foster + Partners multi-tower apartment complex on the banks of London’s River Thames, a duet of desires played in his mind. First, he longed to transform its undoubtedly luxurious but standard-issue interiors into one of the city’s great party spots. And second, a beloved portrait of his idol David Bowie had to take pride of place.

After a few scrolls on Instagram, he found his players: Simone Gordon and Sophie van Winden of Owl Design. The pair had met in an interior architecture course at Ravensbourne University London, rebelling against the school’s partiality toward glass-box minimalism. By 2014, a few years after graduating, they’d founded their own firm, lending their signature blend of fluid shapes and bold colors to hospitality and office projects across the country. The pandemic moved them mainly into residential spaces, freshening up homes with a touch of post-Memphis here, post-Modernism there. With Owl remixing the 2,000-square-foot three-bedroom apartment, the singer knew he’d have a hit.

Gordon and van Winden’s top-to-bottom redesign is indeed off the charts. The pair addressed the challenges of the building’s distinctive curved walls—lovely on the outside but hard to work with in the rooms themselves—with a Memphis-inflected preference for clear geometric forms. The living area walls boast built-in bookshelves that trace the curves, divided into snappy triangular compartments for the client’s collectables.

Owl did put a lot of work into the elevations of each room. “The living room walls are covered in Venetian plaster,” Gordon continues. “That was a real challenge, getting all the nooks and crannies.” Hallways are coated in high-gloss paint to amplify the abundant daylight. And the spare bedrooms boast eye-catching wallcoverings: a blue faux–grass cloth for one, and an op-art repeating pill pattern for the other (the client’s manager’s favorite place to crash).

While guests inevitably dash into the dining area to check out the blockbuster views, the true VIP spots are the hallway in which the Bowie portrait holds court and, unexpectedly, the nearby WC. Its walls are clad in sequin homages to Aladdin Sane’s famed lightning-bolt face paint, and a secreted stereo greets each partier with a timeless hit and timely exhortation to party: “Let’s Dance.”

gubi through chaplins: chaise longue (dining area)

utu soulful lighting through do shop: floor light, ceiling pendant

noom: chairs

zieta through monologue: mirror

viero: wall plaster (living area)

maman rugs: custom rug

amy somerville: sofa fabric

through jane richards interiors: armchair

the conran shop: side table

massproductions through clippings: coffee table

doozie light studio: chandelier

Sella Concept: stools (kitchen)

shimmerwalls: custom wallcovering (wc)

mirror balls: mirror ball

phillip jeffries: wallpaper (guest bedroom)

Jonathan Adler: cushions

holloways of ludlow: table lamp

&tradition through clippings: side table

warwick: sofa fabric (snug)

hung up: custom cushions

gp & j baker: cushion fabric

cto lighting: wall light

the conran shop: side table

Arte: wallpaper (second guest bedroom)

warwick, kirkby design, larsen: headboard fabrics/bed upholstery

natural bed company: side table

oyoy: lamp

moustache through nunido: chair

lydia hardwick: vase

craft gallery: framed print

hung up: curtain fabrication (primary bedroom)

métaphores: curtain fabric

warwick, nobilis, dedar: headboard fabrics

utu soulful lighting through do shop: wall light

Arte: wallcovering

carpenter & carpenter: custom bedside table

forbo flooring systems: custom flooring

hux: custom millwork (living room, snug); custom table (dining room)

the cotswold bed company: custom beds (bedrooms)

fixup: general contractor

Chet Architecture and Ghislaine Viñas Celebrate the Past With This Striking Staircase

2021 Best of Year winner for Staircase

“Celebrating the past while nurturing the present was important to us,” architect Chet Callahan says of the extensive remodeling and decorating of the late 19th–century Los Feliz house he shares with his husband and their two sons. That adventurous spirit is nowhere more evident than in the monolithic, sculptural spiral staircase linking the second floor and the converted attic. It inhabits part of the four-story central atrium created when an existing minstrels’ gallery was removed, linking interior spaces and bringing in more light and air.

The white staircase floats between the period wood paneling, a playful exchange between old and new. It is visible from most parts of the house and—from certain angles—appears a completely minimalist modern addition. But that is a delightful deception. A collaboration between Callahan and designer Ghislaine Viñas, the stair’s interior, with a Adrian Kay Wong mural, is a joyous riot of color, texture, and pattern, the kaleidoscopic walls dancing on either side, flanking a coil of sky-blue carpeted steps. “The imagery incorporates not only aspects of adjacent spaces but also features seen through the windows: the soft layers of the hills, gradients of green, curved roofs of the nearby observatory,” Wong says. Over the stair’s edge one can admire the hand-carved millwork from a century ago alongside contemporary art, one complementing the other. “It was important to make a clear distinction between the modern and the historic,” Callahan says of the style mash-up.

Chet Architecture: Chet Callahan

Ghislaine Viñas: Ghislaine Viñas

Mat Barnes References Gen X Pop Culture in His London Home

The unassuming semidetached in Sydenham, a verdant district in southeast London, had sat empty for six long years before Mat Barnes, founder of Shoreditch architecture studio CAN, got his hands on it. The two-story Edwardian brick house leaked and lacked heating—and that was before part of the ceiling caved in. Still, the Welsh-born talent knew the home could be something special.

Barnes founded CAN in 2016 but the firm’s origins date to the art and design foundation year he took in 2005 to gain admission to the University of Nottingham, a period that exposed him to animation, fashion, and illustration. “That became the basis of CAN”—an acronym for critical architecture network—“which is all about bringing different aspects of the creative world into the discipline.”

Prior to opening his own studio, Barnes worked for a time at Paul Archer Design, a high-end residential practice known for its glass-box modernism. “CAN is something of a reaction against that,” he continues. “At some point in the nineties, the gallery aesthetic leached into people’s homes, and everything became a bland white box: You wouldn’t know who lived there or what they liked.” In contrast, Barnes encourages his clients to tell all, from what music they love to what food they prefer, and feeds the sum into their project.

For this house, the client was Barnes himself, plus wife Laura Dubeck and their two toddlers. To suit family living, he rearranged the upstairs bedrooms, accessed via a newly skylit stair, and added bathrooms so the home is now a four-bed, two-bath. He also opened up the ground floor, leaving only the front parlor, now a lounge, intact. He punched through the brick rear wall to the backyard—pow!—leaving the edges ragged, to add a glass-enclosed extension that became the new living room. The busted portal is framed by twin poles and a horizontal steel I beam, a reference to a scene in Danny Boyle’s seminal 1996 film Trainspotting in which a collapsing masonry wall is upheld by steel props in the squatters’ digs. “I was hunting for the archetypal derelict wall,” Barnes says of his source material. “I wanted to preserve the memory of the old building and the construction.”

• 

• 

The rear extension’s cobalt steel trusses nod to the same in London’s 1976 Hopkins House, an emblem of High-Tech style. “I love the structural expression,” Barnes notes. “Why not use the structure as the character instead of layering on plaster and then artwork?” Chromatic paint accents other architectural features, too, including the stair’s pale-green balustrade and tangerine underside. “We’re surrounded by so many colors and textures in the outside world that to me it feels natural to bring many different patterns and fabrics inside, too.”

The extension’s tubular-steel frame is deliberately thin and fragile-looking, and Barnes wanted a heavy roof in juxtaposition. That quickly morphed into something more original—a parapet in the shape of a mountain—when he came across a snapshot of Disneyland’s Matterhorn roller coaster under construction in 1959. “I loved its realistic concrete mountain teetering atop a skeletal frame,” Barnes explains. His precipice is made of water-jet-cut aluminum foam, created by pumping gas through molten metal, which has a texture resembling an Aero chocolate bar. (He first admired the material on OMA’s Fondazione Prada in Milan.) “It’s a bit of set design and a bit of architecture—a surreal landscape,” Barnes notes.

Likeminded elements followed suit, their conception aided by quizzing his wife, who studied geography, on the subject. A wall in the dining area has a cavelike texture courtesy of roughcast, a type of plaster that is thrown, instead of troweled, on. The aforementioned Trainspotting poles are painted in bands of red and white to mimic ranging rods, land-surveying instruments whose bright coloration is visible even from a long distance or in bad weather.

While Barnes’ approach to the house was “about getting in as much light as possible,” he says, the one off-note is the front parlor. “It’s designed as a dark, cozy opposite to the rest of the interior—a winter room.” The lounge is suffused in a blue tone color-matched to the walls’ Dulux Marine Waters paint, from the velvet sofa to the rug (it took three tries to nail the color of the latter). Also in the same hue are the architectural fragments arrayed on the walls à la British neoclassical architect Sir John Soane’s collection. “His were valuable, though,” laughs Barnes, whereas these entablature bits, plaster cornice, and ceiling rose are broken and secondhand. (Such ingenuity helped keep the overall renovation budget below about $300,000.)

• 

• 

Time and again, Barnes used his own home as a test lab for interesting materials he wanted to try before specifying for clients. Take the kitchen cabinetry, which he and a mate fabricated from recycled plastic surfacing made of compressed cutting boards and milk-bottle tops. “It gives a rocky sense,” he explains. “Plus, I liked the idea of making a kitchen out of chopping boards.”

Tinkering, researching, and eschewing Pinterest trends for personal references has resulted in a 1,600-square-foot home as idiosyncratic as the individuals who live there. It’s a hit with everyone, especially the couple’s young daughter, nearly three, who because of life under extended lockdown, simply assumes everyone has a mountain on their house.

PrevNext

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

harry lawson: kitchen fabricator

hardman structural engineers: structural engineer

catalin london: general contractor

smile plastics: cabinetry material (kitchen)

alessi: kettle

elica: stovetop

factorylux: pendants

through blt direct: sconces

habitat: sofa (lounge)

knoll: coffee table

alusion by cymat technologies: parapet material (extension)

fineline: glass sliding doors

modus: sofa

vlaze: custom tabletop (dining area)

menu: linear pendant

Hay: pendant (hall)

tavistock: sink (bathroom)

crosswater: sink fittings

john lewis: towel rail

grestec tiles: tile

inopera: stone flooring

velfac: casement windows

DULUX, VALSPAR: PAINT