By Fred A. Bernstein

When architects Pina Petricone and Ralph Giannone were ready to show Jody and Julie Cash their plan for updating the couple's 200-year-old house in Toronto, Petricone told them, "Hold on to your hats."

Jody is the president of a company that makes windows for buildings across Canada and the United States. But even he was surprised by what he saw.

The architects were proposing a two-story cascade of clear, curved glass, enveloping the kitchen and den on the first floor and the primary bedroom and bathroom on the second. "We knew he had a passion for glass, " says Petricone, "and we were happy to use glass as the focal point of our design."

Petricone, who founded Giannone Petricone Associates with her husband in 1995, loves contemporary architecture and the ways it can support contemporary life. But the Cashes had bought a historic house with landmark status. Its red brick, Regency-style facade and squarish front porch were familiar to generations of Torontonians, including Jody and Julie, both of whom grew up nearby.

The 19th-century building had endured a lot over the years. "Inside, it was chopped up and lacking most of its original features," says Jody, who considered its interiors "unsalvageable." Luckily, the landmark designation, which dates to 1979, applied to the front and side facades but nothing else.

So the Cashes gutted the interior and replaced it with a 4,700-square-foot house that transitions from closed and traditional in front to open and contemporary in back. The Cashes -- both 45 years old -- say that construction cost a bit more than $5 million.

The architects couldn't preserve the old layout, but they did pay homage to it. In the front of the house, Giannone and Petricone retained the original center-hall floor plan, with the living room on one side and the dining room on the other.

In those rooms, which they call the "heritage layer," the architects chose 13-inch-high baseboards and other details that would reflect the house's history. By contrast, in the back of the house, which they call the "modern layer," there are no moldings, but the opposite: a half-inch-deep reveal at the top and bottom of each wall.

But even the traditional part of the house has bits of contemporary architecture, which the architects think of as pieces that escaped from the back to the front. Chief among them is the stairwell opening, which used to be tight and rectilinear but is now generous and curved. The stair rail is a tour-de-force in wood, with a leather-wrapped curlicue at its ground-floor terminus.

The president of Quest Window Systems in nearby Mississauga, Jody had been fascinated by the house since childhood, when he wondered why it was so much farther from the street than the other houses in its North Toronto neighborhood. He later learned that the house was built in 1828 by William Snider, son of an American who fought for England during the Revolutionary War, then settled in Canada. Along with the house, Snider owned the surrounding 400 acres of farmland. Over the years, the Toronto street grid reached the property, which was later subdivided into narrow townhouse lots. But the Snider House retained 80 feet of street frontage, which is a lot for the area. "It's an amazing luxury to have this much width in a dense neighborhood," says Julie.

The Cashes, who have two children, were interested in the house when it came on the market in 2015. But the couple says they weren't sure they could afford the necessary renovation.

A couple of years later they felt more flush. But the house, which went unsold in 2015, wasn't on the market. They left notes for the owner asking if she would consider selling it. In 2017 she agreed to sell them the property for the equivalent of $3 million, as long as she could stay there another year while her daughter finished high school. Jody agreed, figuring he would use that year to get all the necessary approvals to start building.

Was a year enough time? "No, not by a long shot," Jody says. One reason is that Toronto requires an archaeological assessment before construction can take place on any historically significant site. It took time for the archaeologists to dig around the property, says Jody, adding that they found animal bones and broken pottery but "nothing notable." Another complication was the discovery that to support the landmark brick exterior they would need an entirely new steel structure reaching from the basement to the attic, Jody says, "There might have been a less expensive way to solve the problem. But we wanted to build something that might still be here in 1,000 years."

Construction began in 2020 but Covid slowed things, as contractor Zak Schwartz worked to limit the number of people on the site at any one time. Once the new steel supports were in place, preservation specialists ERA Architects worked to restore the facade, with its polychromatic brickwork and decorative brackets beneath its eaves.

The rear facade posed very different problems. Facing west, it exposed the house to the afternoon sun. "The last thing I wanted was people saying, 'Why is it so hot in here?'" says Jody. The solution was to create insulated glass units (known as IGUs) with four layers of high-performance glass enclosing a layer of insulating argon gas.

Making those panels, some almost 8-feet wide and 12-feet high, then curving them on a tight 24-inch radius, was something no company in the U.S. or Canada, including Jody's, could do. Instead, the 45 panels were made in Spain and shipped to Toronto in containers. Weighing as much as 1,500 pounds, the units were designed to be set into channels in the floor and ceiling and connected to each other with silicone, so they had no protective frames. "It was nerve-racking watching them being craned into place," says Jody.

The architects put as much thought into the interior design as into the dramatic building envelope. The heritage rooms are painted white, while the backrooms sport a range of colors that Giannone says help "draw nature indoors." Built-ins, designed by the architects, include an amoeboid kitchen island that is a bit too wide to pass items across -- so the architects embedded a Lazy-susan in its surface. In the family room, a curved wall covered in blue felt supports a bench and bookshelves, both wrapped in blue leather.

To both the architects and clients, the house now represents the best of two eras: the early 19th-century in front, the early 21st in back. "We think it's the contrast that makes it successful," says Petricone. As the Cashes see it, they have added a new layer of history to the house. Says Jody, "We didn't want it to be trendy. We wanted it to last."

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 07, 2025 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)

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