Good Fit

Contemporary house right at home on modest lot in Point St. Charles

By STEPHANIE WHITTAKER | photography by ADRIEN WILLIAMS | STYLING by DENISE PALISAITIS

On an afternoon when it’s warm enough to throw open a sliding door to the garden, the living room in the home of Tuan Vu and Jean- François Bourdeau is filled with birdsong. It’s a delightful surprise, given the fact that the house is in a dense urban neighbourhood. But the houses on this Point St. Charles street boast deep backyards and tall, mature trees. So the huge flocks of birds, it seems, are as much at home in the neighbourhood as are Tuan and Jean-François. Their house, a two-storey, contemporary structure in a historic neighbourhood that is undergoing gentrification, was built in 2010 on a piece of vacant land. "We found this vacant lot and what we liked is that it’s oriented to the south." They spent a year looking for an architect and serendipitously discovered Stéphane Rasselet of the Montreal-based architectural firm, _naturehumaine, through Design Montreal Open House, an annual event that showcases the city’s architectural and design firms. “We clicked with Stéphane,” says Tuan. “He was calm and he listened to us.” In fulfilling the couple’s architectural wish list, Rasselet would face various challenges. The first was the modest dimensions of the building lot, which was flanked on each side by well-established housing. "It’s 22 feet wideand 96 feet deep," Tuan says of the land. "And the city required us to use no more than 50 per cent of it for the building."

There was also the fact that there was no back alley behind the property, which meant that the back landscaping had to be accounted for before construction began. “We had to bring in all the landscaping materials before we began the building, including the trees,” says Rasselet. “We also had to truck in earth.” “It was a now-or-never thing,” Tuan says of the landscaping. “We didn’t even have time to find a landscaper so I landscaped the backyard myself.”

Another important item on the couple’s wish list was a one-car garage for which they would need permission from the borough’s planning advisory committee. “Some of the committee members approved and others refused,” Rasselet said. “We had to find other houses in the area that have garages to prove that this would fit well into the neighbourhood. We designed the garage door like a coach-house door and built it of Spanish cedar.” The plan, he says, was approved. He says the house’s front facade, clad in dark chocolate brown bricks, was designed to create a seamless fit with its neighbours. “The back facade is a little more funky,” he says. Rasselet designed the house’s footprint to give its occupants a sense of privacy despite the close proximity of neighbours. He says his clients were very attentive to the process. “They were on the building site every morning and every evening and it made it easy to work together,” he says. One request Tuan and Jean-François had was that the size of the staircase be as modest as possible to prevent it from taking up a lot of the interior square footage. So Rasselet cleverly turned the stairs sideways and designed them as if it were a sculptural piece. The saw-toothed stairs are open and they resemble a jigsaw puzzle.

Artist Pierre Fournier built the metal hand rails. “When people go up and down the staircase, it animates that part of the house,” says Rasselet. “It’s like a stage.”

And because every square foot of space has been put to good use, the area under the staircase stores the equipment for the entertainment centre. “It can be controlled by an iPhone,” says Tuan. Another design gem is a square of glass floor on the second storey landing. “It allows light from the skylight to get downstairs,” says Tuan. “At first I was scared of walking on it because I had vertigo. But having it has cured me of my vertigo,” he says. The homeowners love to cook and they entertain a lot. “We have visitors every weekend,” says Tuan. So the design of the ground floor is an open, flow-through space, comprising living room, kitchen and dining room all oriented toward a picture-window wall the overlooks the back garden, a serene outdoor room. The kitchen is at the heart of this home. Jean-François had worked for Cuisines Steam and knew a thing or two about kitchen design. “We wanted four-foot dimensions in the kitchen,” says Tuan. “Four feet on each side of the island, which permits two kitchen drawers to be opened and the cook to move past them.” The Euromobil thermoplastic cabinets, imported from Italy, contrast well with the stainless steel panels and quartercut white oak, used to clad the island. There is a touch of whimsy in the decor. Tuan and Jean-François bought four stools for the island, three of them black and one ochre because, laughs Tuan, “I like it.” Despite its contemporary design with polished concrete floors, the ambience is far from aloof. The liberal use of wood warms the atmosphere. In the dining room, a long wood dining table is lit from above by a massive industrial-style lighting fixture, which makes a strong design statement.

In the adjacent living room, the couple opted for contemporary-style furnishings and as throughout the rest of the house, they are used sparingly. “We don’t like to accumulate things,” says Tuan. “That’s one of the reasons we decided not to have a basement.” Under-floor heating in the ground-level concrete floor keeps the lower level toasty but, says Tuan, on sunny winter days, it is the sun, streaming in though the large living room windows, that heats the concrete. Tuan and Jean-François experienced love at first sight when they first saw a painting by Eveline Boulva in Quebec City. “Once we found her work in a gallery in Old Montreal, it was a race to get it,” says Tuan. “It’s very popular.” Tuan, an engineer by profession, is also a gifted artist who had Rasselet create a studio on the second storey. The architect installed skylights in the space; they’re angled at 45 degrees to take advantage of the light from the south. The homeowners did their own interior design and there is a cohesiveness about it throughout the home. For instance, materials used in the master bathroom are repeated in the ground floor powder room. The slate used on the bathroom floor and walls was also used on the kitchen backsplash. And both master bathroom and powder room boast the same cladding on their walls. While it appears to be an attractive black and white mosaic tile, it is, in fact, wallpaper. “I love this paper,” says Tuan. “It’s an Élitis wallpaper; the texture of it is snake skin meets Bisazza tile.” Throughout the house, the homeowners have abided by the “less is more” rule by banishing clutter and using furnishings sparingly. The home won Rasselet a coveted first prize for interior design this year from the Ordre des architectes du Québec’s annual Awards of Excellence. Despite the fact that the house was built in 2010, it fits in happily with its neighbours and is on the leading edge of the area’s renewal. “Point St. Charles is transforming,” says Tuan. “It’s like the Plateau but the streets are wider and next to downtown.”