Suburban Brutalism

Secret Oasis only for us.

I’ve always wanted to build our own home. But not only that, I wanted to push the idea of the modern home to suit us not only on the outside but on the inside. Function and beauty (in that order) were the paramount goals in this forever home. I have had a long friendship with my builder, David Bernstein, since he renovated our basement in our very first home my husband and I purchased over ten years ago. He had since moved on to full home construction, pushing his own boundaries of modern home building – a professional journey I had followed from afar. When the opportunity arose that my husband and I could purchase a gorgeous large lot in the suburb of Oakville, Ontario, Canada, we grabbed it and rang up David.

My husband and I have always loved traveling and have traveled all over in the US, Central America, Europe and Asia. I, myself, was born in Malaysia and we recently traveled there to visit family and have my children experience where I was born with my grandparents, their great-grandparents. My own childhood was quite nomadic and I have lived in many places in Eastern and Western Canada and with my husband’s career, his training took us from Toronto to NYC and now back here in Hamilton, ON. All these experiences help form one’s ideas of how to live, what is needed to live and an appreciation for different architecture and what eventually resonates with one’s own sensibilities. Living in NYC really brought home a sense of how to optimize space as there was so little of it to be had in the city. Travelling to Spain taught me about finding beauty through juxtaposing the old and classical with the new and modern – to push one’s ideas of architecture as far as one allows one’s imagination to take it. Coming from a large Asian family, I also always have family gatherings and accessibility for my grandparents in mind as my grandmother, for example, has never really spent any time anywhere accept the main floor of any two-storey home we have owned.

The original idea was to create a cozy down-sized single-story home but that soon evolved to an even larger house than the one we moved from. Equally, the great desire to create a space that optimized flow of how we lived was top of mind when David and I put our heads together to figure out the kind of house I and my family wanted to live in.

Recently built modern homes had tons of windows. I love light; but I hated the idea of being a fishbowl with neighbours staring in or having our windows drawn all day long because we didn’t want to be a fishbowl with neighbours staring in. The windows are all in the back where we stare out to a gorgeous little forest of a backyard – it is like our own little cottage retreat. The front of the house is as monolithic as we dared without it becoming institutional. I also wanted big open spaces interiorly. Our lifestyle has never been formal and as many people do, we always gravitate toward the kitchen as social central; I also love to cook. So, let’s make the biggest, baddest kitchen that we could think of with ONE principal dining area and ONE principal family space. I also love the idea of a wet bathroom. I have boys and they have no concept of water control. To waterproof and tile an entire bathroom were paramount to me and we did just that. Materials and features had to be locally sourced, and these had to sing in each designated space. Consistency in use of materials was very important to me. Each space had its own character, but the materials remained the same.

The key material I wanted to use was concrete though. I’ve been a long admirer of brutalist architecture. I wanted the home to be an unadorned beauty. A celebration of what you see is what you get. So, this home is hopefully an example of that sensibility. But even I idealized this concept and I soon learned that concrete has a mind of its own and that concrete is more complex and varied than my simplistic view. Concrete is a material that I had to learn about as it was being poured and set. I had to learn that depending on its application and installation, it can manifest in such different ways and it has a character of its own that will challenge you if you try to manipulate it. I had to shed my own concept of what concrete was – it wasn’t smooth, it wasn’t pretty; it was ugly, it was imperfect, it cracked. Our early attempts at “fixing” the cracks made it worse. Concrete is perfectly imperfect – so much so, there is a particular area in the basement where we had to wrap a bit of a tile around the concrete wall and we purposely retained as much of the raw wall as we could so you can actually see the frame around which we formed the concrete wall. In the dining space, instead of trying to even out the colour of the wall - its variations caused by multiple pours to build it up - we left it so it looks like it is some clastic sedimentary rock. All the countertops, sinks, outdoor tables and even dustbins are concrete; the island in the kitchen is 18 feet and the concrete slab was poured in one long mold and transported here from its workshop in wine country to Oakville by a large transport truck with a crane and 13 men carried that piece in. The floors on the main and lower levels are heated concrete floors.

The second floor, however, is walnut as well as the stairs. The stairs are particularly special to me because this home demanded a staircase that was as solid and imposing as the rest of the spaces. I wanted the idea that if you were to invert the home, you could still walk on the stairs. This segues into another important feature of the build of the home: the local trades and who I would still describe as artisans of their craft truly took ownership of the vision of this home and ran with it. I would give them an idea and they took it upon themselves to really make that concept a reality in the highest standard. I like to think they all had a hand in the creation of our home because it was a new concept and pushed the boundaries of defining modern home builds and so without their expertise, this project would truly have fallen flat. A true highlight of such care and precision can be found in the charred wood ceilings we installed and carried into the patio in the back. The carpenters who built the stairs also installed the ceilings but for the small pieces where there they had to be cut down to size, you could see the raw transected cedar bits so the carpenters actually etched and stained those sides to mimic the charred texture and you would think that the char reached all the way through!! I also wanted the front door to have that same charred wood but it was too heavy to install on both sides of the door so the door builder suggested to take a mould of the wood and he would recreate the look using fibreglass – you would never know the difference….

I can go on and on about my house (I haven’t even talked about my climbable bookshelf or the fireplace in my bedroom that actually is steam and LED lights to recreate the look of fire – hokey as it sounds, it actually looks like real fire – or the design of the lighting for this house that was done with such great care and thought of not making the ceilings look like runways). I would love to sit and chat with you about the many people involved with the project because I am profoundly grateful for their care and thoughtfulness and skill in manifesting an idea into a viable reality.

I do hope you like what we did here. But I also understand if you don’t. This has been a polarizing project in a very established area of Ontario with its own charm and character and not without its own standouts of timeless architecture design and classic layouts. We built in a a long established community with its own thoughts of what is beauty and our project certainly is not unscathed from disputes and disagreement.

But such challenges fade over time and to be honest, this home will outlast us all at the end of the day. I’m just glad we get to live out our lives in this, our Home.