Editor’s note: Andrew Louis has been one of Torontoist‘s photographers for several years; he’s got a particular interest in architecture. Recently he started a new photo project, about what seems ordinary—the walls and doors and everyday textures that we see every day on the city’s streets. It’s a neat way to approach Toronto’s landscape with fresh eyes, and we asked him to tell us about more about it.

Though I have the fancy lenses and big gear that comes with being a photographer, earlier this year I found myself with a new easy way to take photos (a new phone with a usable camera) and new things to take photos of (having moved to an office in a part of Toronto rapidly transitioning from warehouses to condos).

In recent years photography has been democratized both by high-quality, affordable cameras (chances are you already have one) and easy ways of sharing these photos. These days, the way many people most easily share and consume photos is via Instagram. Toronto’s cats, dogs, and plates of food are already well-represented on the service; as a way to balance things out, I decided to start posting photos of our city’s various textures. I started with close-ups of walls. In February, I switched to looking for interesting doors (you can see some of them in the gallery above) and March will be—well, I’ll keep the next theme a mystery.

The project has been a good reminder of how adding an arbitrary constraint to your life can change the way you perceive the environments you move through—when I switched from shooting walls to looking for doors, the same areas I had already captured appeared totally different to me.

You can follow along on Instagram and Tumblr.

Showing at over 40 venues across the city, the Toronto Design Offsite (TO DO) Festival is part experimental design show, part experiential art party, with local designers and artists welcoming the public to visit their exhibitions free of charge. As indie design has gained popularity such events have been popping up much more frequently around the city, and the TO DO Festival, now in its third year, looks to be here to stay.

Mason Studio, an interior design studio based in the Junction, gave us a tour of their exhibition—a gentle landscape of fluffy clouds rolling across a furniture showroom—and chatted a bit about why these events are an important opportunity for local artists.

Come Up to My Room 2013
The Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen Street West)
January 24–27
$10

The curators of the Gladstone Hotel’s annual art and design show, Come Up To My Room, are inviting everyone to, well, come up their rooms and check out the many wonderful and bizarre spectacles created by this year’s commissioned artists and designers.

This year’s show marks CUTMR’s 10th anniversary. It features nine installations in the hotel’s second-floor rooms, and 19 other installations in other locations around (and outside) the Gladstone.

“It’s really about the melding of art and design and looking at the space where those disciplines come together,” says curator Noa Bronstein. “Over time people get behind that concept, appreciate it, and fully understand what it means to do an immersive installation. When you walk into a room you’re really surrounded, and it’s totally transformative.”

Curator David Dick-Agnew adds, “We’ve been trying to grow the show as well. During the first few years it was limited to the second floor and over time it’s grown into the lobby and the restaurant space downstairs. This year we’re trying something new by putting stuff right out in front of the hotel.”

The installations outside the hotel include what could be the most audacious item at CUTMR this year. In the courtyard of the Bohemian Embassy, a nearby condo building, people can find what is best described as a fur-clad jungle gym. It’s called Hyde, and it was created by Devon Thomson and Tess Millar. Its goal is to evoke a childlike wonderment.

This year’s indoor exhibits include such quirky sights as Dwell by Womanking Collective. It consists of 27 small, wooden houses perched on the walls of room 204, each one filled with its own collection of objects or materials for the viewer to decipher.

“We came up with the houses as these private worlds we’re going to investigate,” says Meagan Skyvington, one of Womanking’s three members. “We’ve pretty much set up a neighbourhood for people to investigate.”

The exhibits vary as widely as the artists who made them. Self-taught artist Rachel Speirs created a simulated shipwreck on a little island. The installation is based on her own short story, The Island of Bonemeal. Quadrangle Architects made an installation involving many spools of yarn strung up, around, and out of a room, onto a balcony where it continues with a collection of streamers. This year’s show also has a green roof of sorts. Viewable from the large windows leading up to the second floor, it contains Christmas trees discarded after the holidays. Artist Joeseph Clement drove around in a U-haul for 3 weeks collecting them.

“I wanted to create this more naturalized landscape, so I collected these Christmas trees of various sizes,” he said. “What I wanted to do was make it like a successional forest, because that’s how forests naturally start—from meadow, to short trees, to taller trees. I wanted to make it as natural as possible.”

“But it’s just as much a manufactured landscape as what’s behind it,” explains Clement. “It kind of plays off the notion of what we value, our perception of nature, and our desire for nature.”

On a wall in the hallway hangs Tara Keens-Douglas’ piece, Tapestry. Folded squares of craft paper are woven together into diamond shapes and wrapped with coloured strips, creating a rainbow gradient. It takes on a wavy, organic shape on the wall, but she says it could take on whatever shape it needs to.

“I made it flat on my apartment floor,” she says, in a Trinidadian accent.

For a truly mind-bending experience, check out In All Falsehood by Gaston Soucy and Ruth A. Mora of the Sumo Project. A dark curtain sections off the room, which is illuminated with black lights. Passing through the curtain, the visitor encounters a large cube with mirrors on all sides of it and, coming around the side, finds a small walkway though the structure. Inside the cube, white rods glow under the black light and create the eerie feeling that what you’re seeing isn’t real. Soucy says the point of the installation is to mess with human perception. Suffice it to say, he’s done a great job of it.

CORRECTION: January 25, 2012, 3:00 PM Because of an editing error, this post originally said that admission to Come Up to My Room is free. In fact, it’s $10.

It’s been a busy week for Evan Biddell. The 29-year-old designer, who burst onto the scene in 2007 as the winner of Project Runway Canada, has been occupied by a number of commissions for Bonnie Shore, a fashion plate and socialite (and Biddell’s personal friend). One is a meticulously detailed lambskin motorcycle jacket. Another is a platinum cocktail blazer trimmed in the skin of a python.

Shore is running late for her final fitting and, when she arrives, she takes the mohawked designer in her arms like a long-lost son before discussing the possibility of a matching lambskin skirt—one, perhaps, with less “shit going on” than the jacket.

“Don’t you think it’d be too much?” she asks, fingering the reptilian breastplate on her new jacket’s front.

Biddell shrugs. “I don’t believe in too much.”

It would seem that after five years of doing things decidedly—even stubbornly—his own way, Evan Biddell has finally made it. He has high-profile clients, like Shore, who seek him out and let him play. His brazenly futuristic collections have been well received. Some even liken him to the late British designer (and Biddell’s personal icon) Alexander McQueen.

Just don’t call him a fashion person.

“Fashion people are hilarious,” he says after Shore has left, breaking into a spot-on mimicry of certain characters from scene. “’Ew, that person’s super not thin. They don’t do nearly enough blow.’”

“I’m just…I’m very much on the outside of that.”

Biddell’s first design was a pair of overalls at the age of 15. “I had a girlfriend who was making clothes for a bunch of our friends so I was like, ‘Make me some overalls!’ We were at a rave, and she was like, ‘totally.’” Biddell compensated her with a half-tablet of ecstasy (“so, like, 20 bucks”) and, after that, had her show him how to make things on his own. Within two years, he was designing and selling “fat raver pants” on a nearly full-time basis. Eventually, he expanded into womenswear.

“There’s an alien aesthetic,” is how he describes his work today. “There’s always a softness, and then she’s got a sort of tough exterior. That tough exterior is softening as I get older, though. I don’t need to be as protective.”

As for the “she” he designs for? “Probably myself,” he laughs. “The ‘she’ inside me.”

Biddell estimates that it takes him about two days to put a piece together, on average, though custom work will take longer. He constructs every item himself in a modest Leslieville workspace with a roomy drafting table and two sewing machines. It’s what he thinks sets him apart from other designers, who may employ a team of staff to see their creations through.

“When you hand-make something, it’s really hard to duplicate,” he explains. “You can also guarantee a flaw.” He likens his work to Persian rugs, which are individually made over the course of years. Their blemishes guarantee their authenticity.

But this is part of the appeal. Today, Biddell’s typical clients range from “outrageous performing types” to fashion veterans like Shore, who will approach him with an idea and give him free reign to produce one-of-a-kind pieces that will stand out in the mass-produced crowd.

“I don’t have a clothing line that I wholesale, or chase boutiques around to pay me,” he says. “That whole system of fashion doesn’t work for me. I do special projects, I do clients. I do what I do with my own hands, and not a lot of guys do that anymore.”

Thanks to Moosehead for making this series possible.

The name “Bookhou” sounds vaguely French. It’s not.

Rather, Bookhou is a portmanteau of the last names of its founders, John Booth and Arounna Khounnoraj. The couple are partners in both work and life, and are the artist-designers who, save for a couple of guest ceramic pieces and terraniums from friends, make everything that is sold in their internationally-celebrated shop of handmade wares. First launched as an online business in 2002, with a brick-and-mortar iteration established at Dundas and Palmerston six years later, Bookhou’s offerings run the gamut from fashionable messenger bags to screen-printed baby onesies to furniture.

“It was before the days of Bennifer,” jokes Khounnoraj, on coming up with a name for the business when it launched in 2002. “We kind of started it first.”

But it would turn out to be a strategic choice.

“When we first started the business, we didn’t know what we were going to make,” she admits. What they did know was their desire was to combine their shared backgrounds to create and sell their wares in some capacity. The combined-surname shop moniker would prevent them from getting pigeonholed—though, occasionally, people still assume they sell books.

Khounnoraj comes from an art background and holds degrees from the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and an MFA from the University of Waterloo. Insofar as Bookhou is concerned, she works mostly on sculpture and textiles (sometimes, as a series of framed textile sculptures will attest, at the very same time). Booth on the other hand is primarily a painter and furniture maker with a background in architecture; his training came courtesy of Queens University and the University of Toronto.

“My whole life, I think the common thread is that I keep trying to formalize scribbling,” he muses.

A painter in the abstract expressionist vein, Booth’s approach to furniture design is similarly driven by a fixation on pattern and repetition. In his basement woodshop stands a work-in-progress that will eventually be a headboard on a bed. Right now, it’s a series of wooden beams—dozens of them—warped by steam and held together by firm metal clamps. Within the solid rectangular template of its frame, individual parts bend this way and that over and over again, a design conceit reinforced by redundancy.

Booth starts his pieces with a general idea of what he might like to achieve, then negotiates the details along the way. “I’m formulating it at the exact moment that I’m making it,” he says. “For me, it’s more like painting.”

Booth estimates that he spends around 20 hours per day in the shop.

“We sometimes will complain about how busy it is, and then we kind of stop ourselves because we have other friends who are in the same business and they’re struggling, having to work other jobs, plus trying to do their artwork,” says Khounnoraj as she rivets leather straps onto a series of geometrically-printed canvas bags. “So I feel like we’re really fortunate, because we’ve created this job.”

In spite of the breakneck pace, it’s a lifestyle not without its perks. For one, the duo lives and works in the same building where they raise their two small children. It allows for the store and studio to become a truly family-integrated space, and enables the kids to nurture their own budding creative pursuits. Both children’s work was featured in the inaugural children’s booth at this spring’s City of Craft fair; the younger of the two, Piper, recently asked her father for her own set of tools (“but as long as they’re pink”).

Bookhou’s family-friendly atmosphere has helped on the business front, as well, thanks in large part to Khounnoraj’s popular blog on family life and design inspiration.

“I think the blog has really helped our business, because [the readers] kind of see me as someone they want to be,” she observes. “Because [many of them are] stay-at-home moms, and I’m kind of a stay-at-home mom. I think they like that, and they want to support what I’m doing.” The blog gets around 2,000 hits per day from all over the world, and has attracted visitors from as far away as Japan.

Another, perhaps unlikely, business booster has been the economic downturn.

“People began thinking about what it was that they wanted to buy and started buying more handmade and local, and really thinking about the material choices, spending their money better,” says Khounnoraj. “They wanted their money to be stretched a little further.”

But ultimately, Khounnoraj sees the key selling point of Bookhou’s wares, from the standpoint of both the producers and potential buyers, is that she and Booth are in a position of being able to tailor their products to meet the needs of the consumer.

“We can make something, take it to market, get the market’s feedback, and then make adjustments,” she says. “That’s the great thing about making things one at a time. If you go and get things mass-produced, you can’t catch that.”

Thanks to Moosehead for making this series possible.

Grant Heaps was 14 when his mother first taught him how to sew. “I was always obsessed with fabric, even as a child,” he says. Because of his penchant for creating outfits, Heaps initially pursued fashion design, but eventually he became frustrated with the demands of making clothing fit. “I decided to forget fashion and move on to working with flat things,” he says. For more than a decade, he has spent his free time constructing two-dimensional works of textile art, from hanging quilts to ornate, decorative chair coverings.

Heaps, who has a full-time gig as the assistant wardrobe coordinator at the National Ballet of Canada, began developing his pieces in the hours after work. “I just like working,” he says. “I work all day, and then I come home and work some more.” His art also requires dedication; there’s one piece made up of tiny, hand-sewn circles that he’s been working on for more than four years.

His efforts have paid off. Three years ago, he completed a residency in North Carolina, where he worked out of an old thrift store and made pieces using materials that were already there. “A friend of mine who owns WORN Fashion Journal told me about it,” he said. “The experience really boosted my confidence.”

Heaps has no formal art training, so he was caught off guard when the Textile Museum of Canada approached him and asked if he wanted to participate in their current exhibition, “Dreamland: Textiles and the Canadian Landscape.” “I always dreamed of someone finding me through my blog, and they did!” he says. “It’s an amazing show. It’s just through a bit of luck after another bit of luck that I got to be in it.”

When asked where he finds inspiration for his pieces, Heaps laughs. “My own emotional distress, really!” he says. “Well that, and pop music.” He often uses words and lyrics in his pieces, in an attempt to draw in viewers. “I want my pieces to provide an emotional impact, if not a necessarily a narrative,” he says. He’s currently working on a series of 60 quilts, which will tell the story of an audience member experiencing a theatrical production.

Thanks to the scraps he receives from the ballet, remnants from clothing factories and stuff he collects off the street, Heaps rarely has to buy fabric. When he does, he goes to thrift stores. He sees others in his age group (that is, in their 20s and 30s) experimenting with similar ways of reusing materials for crafts. “There are a lot of people trying to do something different themselves—trying to make something handmade,” he says. “You can see it in the emergence of crafting groups.”

Because of his day job and the low cost of his materials, Heaps isn’t particularly concerned with profit. While he has displayed his work in cafes, book stores and galleries, he doesn’t usually sell his pieces. “I think if I needed to sell my stuff, it would drive me insane,” he says. “I like that I don’t have to make money off of it. For me, the idea of just doing it for myself works really well.”

Thanks to Moosehead for making this series possible.

Once upon a time, awards were established to celebrate the worst in Toronto architecture. The snarky, insulting name of the prize said it all: the Fugly. Time passed, and the awards gradually shifted from hurling abuse at the bottom of the barrel to celebrating the public’s choices for the best new architecture that the city has to offer. With the shift came a slow evolution to a respectable name: the Pug Awards; this year’s were given out last night.

Some, like Globe and Mail columnist John Bentley Mays, miss the snarky spirit of the Fuglys. In a panel discussion yesterday before the awards were distributed, he asked awards co-founder Gary Berman if the shift away from dumping on the worst had dulled its edge. Berman admitted that, like Toronto’s architecture, the awards were gentrifying. Not that respectability is bad: the pre-teen students who won substantial monetary prizes for projects developed as part of the Pug Ed program exemplified the work that’s being done to inform a new generation about the issues surrounding their urban landscape.

Anyone hoping to revel in the worst of the city’s buildings in 2011 had to squint to see which projects were at the bottom of the list in each category; they were shown after the awards were handed out. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows though: only five of the 43 nominees in the residential category were actually on the positive side of the ledger; the rest came in for harsh words.

Mays was part of a panel with Star columnist Christopher Hume (who was introduced with Mays as the “Siskel and Ebert” of local architecture) and former city councillor Kyle Rae. The hour-long discussion about the state of Toronto’s architectural design touched on the highs and lows each had seen over the past few decades, and how the awards could work beyond being a popularity contest. Rae felt that the energy with which some commenters praised buildings on the Pug site, for instance, could be directed into appearances at public meetings for new projects, to balance the NIMBYs and nitpickers who usually show up. (It was fascinating to watch Hume’s face fill with disgust when Rae suggested Toronto had a lousy architectural heritage.)

As far as future issues were concerned, Hume felt that suburban areas like Scarborough are where our next set of architectural problems will arise, as people priced out of living downtown will be faced with structures that appear to be designed with less care than those in the core.

Check out this year’s Pug Award winners, along with the last-place finishers, in the gallery.

Photo of the TD Centre towers by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/produzentin/162953693/sizes/z/in/photostream/"}produzentin{/a} from the {a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/"}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}

The announcement that two giant billboards may soon grace the north- and south-facing sides of the Toronto Dominion Centre’s Ernst and Young tower, officially known as Tower Five, has prompted a call to arms among local architecture aficionados.

Cadillac Fairview, the owners of the Toronto Dominion Centre complex, put in an application to the City on September 21, a proposal to allow for the erection and display of “two illuminated wall signs (expressed as a logo or corporate symbol), each with static copy and each 19.81 metres wide by 2.08 metres long” on the outside of the 12-storey office building. To OCADU professor and architecture historian Marie-Josée Therrien, the implications are concerning.

“What I want to argue is that if we create a precedent here, there is a risk that they will allow such signs on the other towers,” says Therrien of the potential development. “The sign that would be put there would be so large that it will create light pollution, but it will also affect the visual integrity of the complex of the TD Centre as a whole. And it’s very important that we prevent that.”

The trouble is that, while the late 1960s-era complex is a heritage property, as a whole, its individual towers are not. As such, the potential for what Therrien and others consider to be de-facto defacement by way of advertising display is a real threat.

Therrien has started a Facebook campaign to rally community awareness and support in opposing the development. She also is encouraging members of the public to join her at City Hall on December 13, where she will be appealing the decision before the City of Toronto’s Sign Variance Committee [PDF].

Therrien speaks passionately about preserving the building’s integrity, and keeping true to TD Centre architect Mies van der Rohe‘s vision of a clean, elegant design. “Tower Five is on top of the Design Exchange, a museum devoted to design,” she says. “We have a responsibility to maintain a practice of excellence of design, and if we are adding a sign to the complex, we are not maintaining a quality that has been maintained for decades now.”

Therrien sees the building as part of Toronto’s heritage skyline, and she notes that people have reacted to the sign proposal with great emotion. “People are really upset, and find [the billboard proposal] grotesque.”

Ultimately, the outcry stems from sheer principle. As Therrien neatly puts it, “We’ve got one of the best examples of modern corporate architecture in the world, and it’s important we preserve that.”

Cadillac Fairview did not respond to our requests for comment on this story.

Unbuilt Toronto 2's cover. Image courtesy of Dundurn Press.

There’s a concrete pad in front of 52 Division (east of University Avenue and Dundas Street) where the police park their cruisers. Lots of people know that it was originally intended to be a public space. But Mark Osbaldeston, whose second book of local city-planning nonstarters, Unbuilt Toronto 2, was released on October 24, discovered in the course of his research that there’s a lot more to the story.

The original plan, he told a crowd during a lecture in the ROM’s Signy and Cleophee Eaton Theatre on a recent weeknight, was for the pad to be the start of a grand promenade that would have provided pedestrians with a sightline directly west on Dundas Street, from University Avenue to the Art Gallery of Ontario. The City came up with the scheme in 1963. “The tragedy is they came so close to achieving it,” he said.

Making the promenade happen would have required the City to assemble four plots of land. Within a little more than a decade they’d secured two of the plots and built 52 Division on a third, with the pad there to serve as a placeholder for the eventual widening of the sidewalk leading up to the gallery.

But the last block, at Dundas and St. Patrick streets, had a private owner. The City tried to raise the money to buy it, but neither Metro nor the province would pony up.

The plan was scuttled once and for all in the ’90s, when a developer built a midrise on the fourth plot, sundering the connection between 52 Division and the AGO and leaving the concrete pad as a vestige. If you go to University and Dundas now and look west, you’ll see nothing but the façade of the midrise’s ground-floor indoor mall, called The Village on The Grange. The AGO, with its Frank Gehry façade, is hidden from view. It is, as Osbaldeston said, a tragedy. (See the Streetview map, below, for proof.)

The view from Dundas Street looking west.

The only other remnant of the plan is a small colonnade on an OCAD building on the southeast corner of Dundas and McCaul streets. Osbaldeston showed the crowd a picture of it on a large projector screen.

“I’m sure that the OCAD students who use this place have no idea that it was the last pathetic gasp of this grand scheme from 1963,” he said.

Unbuilt Toronto 2 only mentions this episode in passing, but it contains plenty of similar stories, all dealing with plans for major corporate and civic landmarks, all of which went awry. The cover image (above) is a rendering of a proposed extension to the Royal Ontario Museum that would have been erected on the current site of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, had it been built as planned, in 1910. The book also goes into some detail about the first of many times Toronto failed to build a subway line. That was in 1912. The proposal—which would have resulted in the creation of a network of tunnels between Front Street and St. Clair Avenue—was, as Osbaldeston tells it, killed in a referendum because voters thought it was too costly, at $5.4 million. (Subways now cost billions, so Toronto arguably passed up a bargain.)

Osbaldeston is a lawyer at Ontario’s Ministry of Finance. He does his historical research as a sideline.

“Before I ever went to law school I was interested in history,” he said during an interview. “I’ve always been particularly interested in architectural history.”

His interest in plans that never came to fruition might seem ghoulish on the surface, but he thinks his books can be instructive. “Sometimes even the original intentions of these plans get lost,” he said. In the right hands, he added, his type of research can act as a bulwark against shortsightedness. “You need people around that are willing to take that long view.”

“It’s also priorities. People look at a city like Chicago and say it looks great. It doesn’t look great because that’s the way it happened. It’s because that was a priority for them.” Toronto, he believes, has been plagued by parsimony almost from its inception. One recent example is the flap over the Fort York bridge, almost killed by council because of its $26-million price tag, and now undergoing a cost-conscious redesign.

But this is also the city that built—and maintained—landmarks like Union Station and Old City Hall. “We haven’t done everything wrong,” Osbaldeston said.

We Live Here unlocks the stories behind some of Toronto’s most unique, quirky, and all-out weird homes, the people who live in them, and the people who live with them.

Darren Berberick (left) and Benjamin Walsh (right) walk the plank every day to get into their four-story home.

When Darren Berberick decided to rent a new home with his partner, Benjamin Walsh, he sent a link to his father. The response wasn’t exactly congratulatory.

“What the hell am I looking at?” his dad asked.

For any other house, this might be an unexpected reaction. But for the building at 157 Coxwell Avenue, well, even Berberick thought the same thing the first time he saw it.

“I remember the first time we saw it.” They were riding their bikes to the movie store, Walsh interjects. “Months before we even thought about living here, we rode past it and, like a lot of other people who see it, we thought ‘What is that place?’ ‘What does it look like inside?’ ‘Do people live there?’” Berberick explains, leisurely sitting on the hardwood of the third-floor living room, inside the very house that piqued his curiosity more than one year ago.

“My first instinct wasn’t ‘oh my God, I want to live there.’ It was just ‘oh my God,’” says Walsh. “It was clear that the architect was doing something interesting, something outside of what was standard practice, and that was an immediate draw.”

The first floor kitchen/laundry/dining room. The stairs lead up to Berberick and Walsh's bathroom and master bedroom.

The tall, thin structure in bold primary colour blocks, set on top of four stilts, connected to the Coxwell sidewalk by a 35-foot-long bridge, can bring a variety of inspirations to mind—a LEGO creation, a water vessel, a spaceship, a Rubik’s cube, an inhabitable version of Marge Simpson’s hair, etc, etc… But standing confidently on the fairly nondescript, busy street on the edge of the Indian Bazarre in Toronto’s east end, it’s safe to say that whatever it is, it’s something.

“I think there’s something about it—the colours, the shape… There are a lot of questions you come up with,” says Berberick, who first heard the home was up for rent last September from his friend who lives next door. “I made an appointment to view it, just to look inside more than anything. I assumed we couldn’t afford it.” But that viewing led to a hours-long conversation with the building’s architect and owner, Rohan Walters, during which they decided the home was a perfect fit for Berberick and Walsh, who celebrated their first anniversary living at 157 Coxwell this month.

Walters himself says that when he interviews potential tenants, he looks for the same qualities that any landlord would—responsible, respectful, employed, and so on. But Berberick and Walsh say they feel an unusual sense of obligation to treat their home—Walters’ “baby”—with special care. The home at 157 Coxwell reflects Walters’ ambition to introduce alternative architectural solutions to “problematic” properties, much like his own home at 1292 College Street. This lot in particular wasn’t only awkward in size, about 23 feet wide and over 130 feet long, but 20 inches of topsoil (reminders of a time when Lake Ontario covered the land) made it unsuitable for any foundation. But by using stilts that extend 48 feet into the earth, he not only gave the house stability but also a handy parking spot underneath the main floor.

The house is also an example of affordable, eco-friendly architecture, with the design acting like a giant chimney with circulating air to cool it in the summer, and radiant heating in the concrete floors. The whole building cost about $95 per square foot.

As for the bold exterior in blue, red, yellow, and green plywood panels, Walters found his inspiration while at the AGO, looking at Group of Seven paintings.

“In this particular neighbourhood, the confluence of culture and economics gave me the opportunity to be unique. I wanted to introduce into Toronto the notion of colour,” he says. “In our Ontario native landscape, we have colours that were overlooked by many of the European heritage builders. I wanted to reintroduce them on a larger palate, to see if it worked. Somehow it does. When you visit [the house] in sunrise and sunset, and the leaves are changing and falling, it works.”

The rooftop patio, four stories high, is one area in the house that Berberick and Walsh haven't yet figured out how to use properly.

The house’s connection to nature isn’t immediate, but for Berberick and Walsh, nature has become a kind of roommate for them (and they aren’t only referring to the family of squirrels that have taken root underneath among the stilts). Each of their favourite spots in the home (a reading corner for Walsh, the bathtub for Berberick) just happen to be beside large windows that look out onto the treetops next to the house. The rooftop patio also boasts a view of the lake on a clear day. Exposed beams and wooden trims bring in more natural influences. And the house even seems to respond directly to the weather, with wind audibly whizzing through the windows and causing it to sway back and forth.

“When you’re inside, nature never seems that far away. At night, you really feel like you’re at a cottage,” Walsh says.

Berberick and Walsh describe the one-room-per-floor interior as “a blank slate,” as no room except for the bathroom has any defining feature. Though Walters had a particular layout in mind (to have a reception area on the ground floor, a kitchen on the second floor, and a master bedroom on the third, leading up to the rooftop patio), Berberick and Walsh configured the spaces to suit their needs and decor, with the kitchen and dining area on the bottom and the living room at the top, furnished with a variety of ecclectic pieces and knick-knacks including souvenirs from India, garage sale finds, and antiques inherited from their grandparents.

“For us it’s perfect. It seemed like the stuff we have accumulated over the last few years; it feels like it was meant to be in this house,” says Walsh.

Berberick and Walsh's living room, with a small patio in the front and stairs leading to a 120-square-foot rooftop patio.

“I expected it to be a little more ultra-modern inside,” says their neighbour, who wishes to remain anonymous. “That’s what’s great about the house, the mystery of it.”

He moved onto the block two years ago and says the home was more attractive to him because of its odd neighbour. Like Berberick, Walsh, and about four to five passersby he sees staring at the house agog every day, the house always raises questions in his mind.

“You certainly come away asking ‘What is typical?’ ‘Is that all there is?’ The answer’s no, homes don’t all have to be built the same way,” he says, comparing it to a more conventional home that was recently built further south on Coxwell. “What would I rather have? I’d rather have the multi-coloured cube house. I wake up and I have something to inspire me, to shake the tree of creativity.”

He’s not the only neighbour to be enthralled by the house. Berberick and Walsh often overhear shocked reactions from viewers outside, receive requests to see inside, and once even had a couple of canvassers stroll up and down the street over and over until they saw someone was home before knocking on their door. Not that they mind. When they first moved in, their home was an icebreaker when meeting their neighbours. In fact, it still comes up regularly, and early, in conversation.

“People introduce us like ‘This is Darren. You know that weird house on Coxwell? That’s where he lives.’ Instead of ‘This is Darren, and he’s really intelligent and attractive,’” Berberick jokes. “But a month will go by and no one will ask you about it or talk about, and it becomes your normal. You come home and you walk along the bridge, and at night you’re walking around and the house is shaking, and you don’t think about it. And then you open the door to leave in the morning and there are four people standing there staring at your house, and you think, ‘Oh right, there’s something interesting happening here.’”

Both Berberick and Walsh are the first to admit it’s not for everyone—it moves, it has virtually no space for storage or guests, the bathroom has a very large window, its energy-efficient lights sometimes flicker annoyingly, and Berberick personally thinks the multiple flights of stairs are his nemeses. They’re still “working out their relationship with stuff,” with many boxes still unpacked solely due to the lack of closets, and they have yet to decided what to do with the rooftop patio and backyard. There are still many mysteries within their home even after a year of living at 157 Coxwell, but Berberick finds himself asking one question in particular.

“This is the only house we’ve ever lived in where often we just randomly say, ‘Can you believe we live here?’”

UPDATE, 3:49 PM: The anonymous neighbour asked that we remove his street address, which originally appeared in this article, for privacy reasons.

Rendering from the environmental assessment of the proposed bridge.

On May 18, Toronto’s councillors decided to let the planned Fort York pedestrian and cycling bridge die. Last night they gave it a prize.

The Toronto Urban Design Awards “acknowledge the significant contribution that architects, landscape architects, urban designers, artists, design students, and city builders make to the look and livability of our city.” Awarded every other year, winners are selected by a jury of architects and urban designers; the City holds a ceremony (this year, at the Palais Royale) and the winning designs are exhibited at city centres and Toronto City Hall.

This made things somewhat awkward yesterday, when that jury of respected design professionals recognized the merits of the Fort York bridge. It was accorded an Award of Excellence, in fact, in the “vision and master plans” category. “The number and quality of this year’s nominated projects demonstrate a high level of sophistication and excellence in the design and construction of structures throughout the city,” said Councillor Peter Milczyn (Ward 5, Etobicoke Lakeshore).

Yes, he was one of those who voted the bridge down.

“It’s tragic; there were tears,” says Oakley about his reaction to the news. “Like, a lot of them. To have to move for something like that—it’s horrible.” Still, he’s optimistic about the move, especially since the new store is only a stone’s throw across a busy intersection away. “It’s really going to feel a lot like the normal Sonic Boom. We just have to figure out a few things, including the windows,” he says. “Hopefully I’ll do three windows and rotate them a bit more frequently, and then also do one window at the new store in Kensington.” The old loading dock of Honest Ed’s will serve as Oakley’s workshop, providing him with a new—albeit somewhat smaller—place to dream up his creations.
Reluctant to describe himself as an artist, Oakley, who has no artistic training, and was planning to be a sci-fi writer when he moved to Toronto in 2000, is first and foremost a Sonic Boom man. He “fell in love” with the place when he started working at the store as a cashier, and when the staff suggested creating art displays to supplement album-promo material, Oakley jumped at the chance. Even though he had no experience with design, the store let him conceptualize their first display, a Chemical Brothers release. The rest is history; Oakley’s windows are the stuff of Toronto legend. “If the store hadn’t been behind it, [the displays] wouldn’t exist,” he says. “I owe this place so much for having nurtured this.”
We chatted with Oakley recently about those windows, and the work that goes into making them.

Oakley’s workshop, complete with furry monster head (centre).

When you started doing the displays, what kind of skills or techniques did you have to learn?
I had to get over my fear of power tools; every one I had to learn myself. I’m actually lucky that most things I’ve built have worked; thankfully it only has to stand in a window, and not be touched or fall down. [Oakley takes this moment to demonstrate the fragile construction of the papier-mâché/fake fur monster head that was featured in the Christmas display.] If you traced the evolution of the windows, you would probably notice my learning curve. I think going forward I’m going to try to use more props, which people seem to like.
How do you pick which albums to feature?
Basically [the staff] all kind of sit down and look at what’s coming out in the next month or so; it’s very collaborative. But we’re very in control and have a lot of freedom over what we choose. We get hit up a lot by labels, but we don’t feel indebted or anything: it doesn’t have to be a local band, or even a Canadian band. One time we left a Dinosaur Jr. display up for like six months! It’s great to have that freedom.
Where do you draw inspiration for each display? Do you focus on the band’s music?
I’m very respectful of the album art; I’ll look at an album cover and try to duplicate some element of it, or enhance it in 3-D. The form then takes on its own ideas. Sometimes if I can track down the liner notes I’ll use those as a stepping point. I’ve actually done displays for albums I’ve never listened to! But then there are also ones for bands I love; it was without question, for example, that I’d do a Superchunk album.

How does it feel to be part of an Annex cultural landmark?
It’s more for Sonic Boom than for myself, but it’s pretty amazing. It’s sort of a weird form of celebrity, although it’s good to feel like we’ve done something right [with the windows]. I’m pretty hard on the windows myself, and sometimes I don’t like them. If I was trying to look at them as art, I would be very critical. But this serves a different purpose; it’s merchandising in a fun and creative way. I’m lucky that people respond to the sloppiness of my craft. It’s very humbling to know that it’s a part of Toronto. I’m excited that we’re still going to be in the same neighbourhood [after the move]; where we ended up landing couldn’t have been any better. Nothing about Sonic Boom is going to be compromised at the new location.
Your wife is also a window designer, and you guys share a design blog. In what ways do you work together or inspire one another?
She does the windows at Anthropologie, and she’s really creative, so I pick her brain all the time. The success of the windows has led to fairly routine offers for her and I for freelance gigs designing props and other pieces for bands, weddings, and films. But I don’t think I’d do [a full-time job] somewhere else, though; that would weaken the Sonic Boom brand. I love my job here, even if sometimes I spend the night awake worrying that I’m going to burn the store down because I didn’t plug something in on the display. I am looking forward to setting up the new store—two new stores, for that matter. I’m excited to get to work every day, and I come home bloody and sweaty and feeling completely satisfied. I really don’t know anyone else who feels that way about their job.
Photos by Miles Storey/Torontoist.