How They Pulled It Off: An Asymmetrical Facade Clad in Diamond-Shaped Tiles

Geometric forms and a tall, slim silhouette make the most of the home’s narrow site.

Text by

Kate Reggev

Photos by

doublespace photography

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Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

A steeply sloping site and a narrow plot may not be the ideal recipe for a unique contemporary home, but they were the starting ingredients for a growing Toronto family when they reached out to local architecture firm Reigo & Bauer.

The four-bedroom home features a front elevation with offset windows of different sizes that create a dynamic facade that follows the angle of the roofline. Like the rest of the home—and its surrounding mature trees—all of the windows are tall and narrow.

The homeowners—two professionals who work locally—inherited the property, which had a lot going for it: a convenient location in The Beaches neighborhood within walking distance to Lake Ontario’s public shores, a mature deciduous forest behind it creating a lush green backdrop, and the placement on a cul-de-sac with a quiet, neighborhoody feel.

Urban infill sites, like this home, are the types of projects where Reigo & Bauer like to take cues from the local vernacular and surrounding buildings.

However, the bungalow was too small for the expanding family, who were expecting their first child by the time the design process started with the firm’s founders, Merike and Stephen Bauer. They had a second by the time the project wrapped up! "The homeowners wanted to create a comfortable space for living with their daughters that reflected their appreciation for contemporary design," says Merike. An expansion or renovation of the bungalow wouldn’t give them what they were looking for, so they designed a new home for the plot.

The same fiber-cement shingle was used at most of the vertical surfaces and the roof, with the exception of select areas at the entry and some facets at the side. A skylight, nearly hidden from the street, helps to bring daylight into the middle of the upper floor.

Reigo & Bauer looked to the site for initial inspiration. "The steeply pitched forested site was a starting point for the primary concepts for the design of the house," Merike notes. They developed a design that employed tall and narrow proportions for both the overall form of the house as well as for the windows on the front elevation; the narrow, floor-to-ceiling windows achieve privacy while still allowing in daylight. At the rear, the stacked windows and doors were designed to enable views up into the forest.

The entry steps, made of concrete, are bordered by a minimalist white picket fence with wood handrails. Even the pickets reiterate the curves of the entry area.

The overall form of the house resulted from daylight studies that brought natural light into the center of the home—typically a challenge for lots that are long and narrow, and a common theme in Reigo & Bauer’s work. With its ridge beam (the primary structural member of the roof) placed diagonally to maximize sunlight, the roof became a dynamic shape that is distinct at the front and rear facades.

The curved orbs of the exterior lighting mimics the curves of the half-arch at the entryway.

The entry to the home was created by carving into the front facade and creating a recessed entry for a set of steps up to the front door. Unlike the rest of the facade, which is characterized by sharp, acute angles, the entry is curved and forms a half arch, welcoming visitors and residents.

By stepping the facade back for the entry, windows were able to be placed at sides of the home, where it narrows. This brings in natural light into the middle of the home, which would have otherwise been quite dark.

This curved entry area is further distinguished from the rest of the facade by crisp, horizontal white cement board cladding, in contrast to the rest of the home which is clad in gray diamond-shaped cement board tiles. These tiles flow "from the walls over the garage door to the roof, so the building reads as a coherent volume," Merike says.

Windows at the rear are double-height, and enable an appreciation of the double-height living space at the interior.

The resulting 2,000-square-foot, four-bedroom home is unquestionably different from nearby older, more traditional homes, but its gabled roof, overall scale, and use of repeating materials make it sympathetic to its neighbors. As Merike says: "A contemporary structure need not be at odds with its surroundings."

How They Pulled It Off: the Asymmetrical Facade

Both the roof and wall are constructed using a rain-screen cladding system covered in SVK Ardent Fiber Cement Slate tiles and the south-facing side wall and arc of the entry are faced with KØL High Density Fiber Cement panels.
A continuous layer of compressed mineral wool insulation covers the exterior shell of the building, while the wall and roof assemblies are conventionally insulated from within.
Because of the geometries of the roof and the diamond shape of the tile, careful planning and execution was required in close collaboration with the exceptionally skilled carpenters on-site.
The windows and doors are Alumilex ALX 2066 series.