selected writing
Ell House
Azure Magazine Spring 2021
Print + Online
Two young studios blend Nordic architecture and California modernism for a distinctively shaped getaway in Ontario wine country.
Designer of the Year: Batay-Csorba
Designlines Issue 1, 2021
Print + Online
The firm’s density-minded and context-driven designs take deeply familiar architectures and reinvent them in new ways.
Art Haus Rules
LUXE Magazine Autumn 2020
Print + Online
When original Picasso ceramics and an early-career Emily Carr oil painting find themselves in your personal art collection, you’d better believe they anchor the architecture around them.
Victoria Foley and Paul Fredricks lived in their Yorkville brownstone for more than a decade before taking on a tip-to-toe renovation – so when they did, they were ready.
“It was time for the house to become an expression of what we really wanted,” Foley says. First up in that playbook: to breathe a strong contemporary spirit into the 1890s-built Victorian, one that simultaneously honoured the architectural heritage of the neighbourhood. Second, to create intentional spaces for the couple’s 100-plus artworks without sacrificing liveability and comfort.
From vibrant sculpture to digital art designed for the screen, the couple’s modern collection was sure to do anything but fade into the background. What was needed was a white cube infused with a healthy dose of passion and personality. Gallery-like, yes. Cold and institutional? No thanks.
Designer of the Year:
Superkul
Designlines Issue 1, 2020
Print + Online
Why build a passive house? To this question, Meg Graham and Andre D’Elia return a thoughtful gaze. “Because,” Graham says, “it’s the right thing to do.”
A succinct answer, but not a simple one. Fitting, too, for the founders of Superkül, who shorthand their aesthetic as “just enough” – a philosophy that proves much more complex than it sounds. As the couple explains, passive homes – which use new building technologies to achieve a highly reduced environmental footprint – offer more than ethics and a pat on the back. They also boast near-zero emissions, improved air quality and radically lower utility bills.
Symphony of Style
Designlines Issue 3-4, 2020
Print + Online
For a house defined by bold architectures, details become an integral part of Bauer’s design strategy…Such moments fuse the polish of a perfectly tailored tuxedo with any home’s most basic necessity: comfort. Detailing that poses, in Bauer’s own words, an important question: is there a modernism for a broader public? In tracing where the mode can meet traditional counterpoints, Bauer proves just that by transforming austere into familiar, stark into wonderfully livable.
Designer of the Year: Lebel & Bouliane
Designlines, Issue 1, 2019
Print + Online
Heading a studio of just eight, Natasha Lebel and Luc Bouliane may seem to hold unlikely seats at the table of notables ushering in a new era of contemporary Canadian design. But then, Lebel & Bouliane is not your average boutique firm. For one thing, they’ve all but ignored a mainstay of modern architecture: the cube.
For almost a decade, trapezoids, triangles and faceted surfaces have defined the couple’s portfolio, from a sprawling estate on the Scarborough Bluffs to the marble-edged front desk at Canada’s largest ad agency. L&B’s award-winning Relmar Houses in Forest Hill actually began with an image of a cracked-open geode – a pebble split down the centre to reveal a prismatic, crystallized interior.
Glass Act
Designlines Issue 4, 2018
Print + Online
The essential Canadian design story you’ve never heard.
The year is 1902. A 20-year-old farmhand arrives in Toronto from nearby Dufferin County. His name is William John Hughes; friends call him Jack. He settles in the city’s then-industrial Wychwood neighbourhood and becomes an artisan glass cutter, learning to hand-etch delicate patterns into fine tableware. Hughes soon becomes fixated on one of his designs in particular. Inspired by a blue wildflower that grows by the roadside in his hometown, it features a striking hexagonal grid – the flower’s central disc – surrounded by buttery petals and a spray of leaves. He calls it Corn Flower glass.
Rocking the House
Azure Magazine May 2019
Print + Online
In Friuli — the mountainous, highly seismic region of northeastern Italy — stone holds much more than physical weight. Architecturally, it’s an emblem of the local alpine geography and symbolic of building traditions that have survived for centuries in small Italian towns.
San Quirino is one such town. In its historic centre now stands a contemporary concrete coach house, completed last year as part of the redevelopment of a residential area. Although the project was designed to address the structural demands of the earthquake-prone territory, the real curveball for its architects, Turin firm ElasticoSPA, was a local building code regulation that mandates the decorative use of stone, in traditional forms – an attempt to preserve the region’s architectural character.
The Secret World of Paolo Ferrari
Designlines Issue 1, 2020
Print + Online
At the foot of Liberty Village, a towering wooden door stands mysteriously among the crumbling, graffitied walls of an alleyway. Once, it led to a secret sex club overlooking the Gardiner — before that, a foundry and warehouse for the Canada Metal Company. But those pasts are a far cry from the elegances that now live within. Today, the door opens to the transformative studio of Paolo Ferrari.
Between the Lines
Azure Magazine December 2019
Print + Online
In Spain, tile-spotting is a veritable tourist activity. In particular, Barcelona’s sidewalks – covered in patterned panot paving tiles designed by celebrated Catalan architects of past and present – are an ode to the material: Antoni Gaudí’s oceanic hexagons, among the city’s most famous, create an abstract vista of sea creatures along the Passeig de Gràcia.
Spain is also the birthplace of modern hydraulic tiles, which first appeared in Catalonia in the 1850s. Add that legacy to the country’s enduring palette of bold geometric shapes and terracotta and you have the driving force behind the home of Laia Herrera and Biel Huguet, owners of the Mallorca-based tile brand Huguet.
This Creative City 2018
Designlines Issue 1, 2018
Print + Online
Julia Dault
Every artist or designer entertains a dialogue with their materials. For some, the conversation remains covert. For Julia Dault, it becomes the art itself. Untitled 39, 9:30-11:50 AM, September 26, 2017 is one of her latest sculptures in which sheets of Formica and Plexiglas are bent to energetic curves, then harnessed with ropes and Everlast boxing wrap. Untitled 1 was her first piece exhibited, the thesis produced in 2008 for her MFA at Parsons School of Design. In 2012, she showed two paintings and a sculpture at the prestigious New Museum Triennial, and soon, the collectors came calling. Read more
Partisans
Step into the offices of multidisciplinary architecture firm Partisans, and the world as you know it changes. In their world, a dated parking garage becomes a landmark waterside hotel. The long-dormant Hearn power plant is reborn as the stomping grounds of Luminato. And a traditional Canadian A-frame is reinterpreted as a hyper-modern cottage never before seen on the shores of the Muskokas. “A lot of firms build their brand based on a consistency of aesthetic,” says Nicola Spunt, Partisans’ director of culture and content. “We strive to surprise at every turn.” Read more
Anony
As lighting designers, Christian Lo and David Ryan of Anony were up to their elbows in bedazzled chandeliers and custom lighting systems – some with steep price tags – when reality hit them hard. “The objects were out of touch with what we prefer aesthetically, and what we could afford ourselves,” says Lo, realizing that she still had a bare lightbulb hanging from a junction box in her own apartment kitchen. Read more
Jordan Soderberg Mills
When Jordan Söderberg Mills set out to create an Instagram filter you could hold in the palm of your hand, he turned to glass prisms and physical optics over HTML5. His miniature cubes are completely analogue and can be rested on an iPhone camera to create a techni-colour periscope. The same old-school technology powers Söderberg Mills’ Anaglyph mirrors – hybrid art and design pieces making the rounds at galleries and design shows across the globe. Read more
Yaw Tony
A purple antelope, seafoam-green vines, and a bull wearing a neckerchief jockey in the spokes of a fiery-red wheel. In the middle, a rocking horse is accented by shoots of tropical flowers. It’s not an acid trip – it’s a silk scarf by architect and designer Yaw Tony, and it mesmerizes with its wild colourscape. Read more
This Creative City 2017
Designlines Issue 1, 2017
Print + Online
Djuna Day
In 2007, Djuna Day looked at a pile of discarded offcuts and instead of seeing wood waste, she saw an art series. The self-taught designer had found her start at Dakota Jackson’s studio in New York, putting the finishing touches on avant-garde furniture destined for Hollywood homes. During her rogue training at woodworking co-ops in Brooklyn, Day began arranging the offcuts in framed boxes and staining them black. “It was the beginning of my commentary on how we disassemble our planet. The patterns I was assembling felt very dystopian to me – very sci-fi, post-apocalyptic and foreign to what the material once was – a tree.” Read more
Studio Junction
Not many folks can lay claim to a personal home with international design status, but then Christine Ho Ping Kong and Peter Tan are not your average couple. It’s Saturday morning at their Courtyard House, one of the most famous iterations of residential architecture Toronto has seen since the millennium. The Asian-inspired home and office is also the project that launched Studio Junction, the duo’s award-winning architecture firm. Now, in their studio, located in their ivy-covered abode, Ho Ping Kong’s and Tan’s original tables, credenzas and tea carts beam in muted white oak and rich walnut. More than 10 years after its exciting debut, Studio Junction has set its sights on a new pursuit: a furniture line. Read more
Mercury Bureau
Shane Krepakevich gestures to a table lamp in his living room, a smooth block of maple speared by two delicate metal rods. “I like creating objects with asymmetry, but I always try to create a balanced final form,” he says.
The studio, hidden down a laneway in Little Portugal, is an archive of the maker’s history in art and design. On the bookshelf, a stainless-steel prismatic desktop organizer occupies space as both a sculpture and design object. Commissioned for the 2016 Youth exhibition at Souvenir Studios, the Brockton Village design boutique, the eye-catching piece was inspired by a 1980s desk accessory from his dad’s office that had captivated him as a kid. Meanwhile, his trademark Cut Pendant glows above the dining table, casting moody amber light around the room.
Read more
Leu Webb
When you commission Christine Leu and Alan Webb for an art installation, there’s no telling what you’re going to get – and that’s just how their patrons like it. The architects behind LeuWebb Projects have pulled off everything from an interactive inflatable parachute at MaRS, to the rewiring of a 1940s sign for a sound-responsive light show at Nuit Blanche. Oh, and they’re currently developing a design to recreate the Gladstone Hotel’s historic cupola (read: its original tower peak, removed in 1930) using locally manufactured solar panels. Read more
Janet Macpherson
Dozens upon dozens of plaster moulds line the shelves of Janet Macpherson’s studio on Geary Avenue. “Rat tail”, one reads. “Sheep head”, another, and a concise but slightly troubling, “Arms”. The Barrie-born artist is preparing for her next exhibition at the Gardiner Museum, and nearly every surface is covered in her signature spliced ceramic animals, the haunting figurines she’s been engineering since 2008.
Macpherson focused on pottery characterized by its sgraffito technique for six years before a mould-making class (taken while completing her MFA at Ohio State University) sparked her departure from functional pots. “It resonated immediately as the way I was supposed to be working,” she says. Read more
Riddle Me This
Designlines Issue 4, 2017
Print + Online
Enzo Mari and the enduring power of the puzzle
It was Erno Rubik, inventor of the Rubik’s Cube, who pointed out that the problems of puzzles are very near to the problems of life. Full of voids, misplaced pieces and false starts, existence has no simple arrangement. Maybe that’s why puzzles remain such beloved objects, harnessing life’s rare sensation that something has fallen directly into place, and compressing it into winnable play.
Such a puzzle lives in Porch Modern, Colen Colthurst’s rare furniture showroom off Geary Avenue. It’s a 1972 edition of 16 Animali by Enzo Mari, made from expandable resin masquerading as wood – and it will cost you $1500.
Limited production (Danese makes 200 a year) contributes to the price tag, but by no means does that translate to hands off. It may be a revered object from an Italian artist-designer whose work has been collected by the MoMA, but it also begs to be stacked, towered and herded, bringing the static 2D puzzle into 3D form. “It’s an expensive toy,” says Colthurst. “But it’s an inexpensive piece of sculpture, too.”
One that might seem at odds with its maker. Mari is, after all, known for his abrupt temperament and communist leanings. His Marxist-inspired DIY furniture – blueprinted in the 1974 book Autoprogettazione – is a far cry from his series of toys for Danese Milano. According to Colthurst, Mari dreamt about Animali before designing the first version in 1957, his Noah-esque vision not yet tainted by the political strife of 1970s Italy.
A flirtation between naiveté and sophistication, the elephant, birds, kangaroo and others are defined by the meticulous precision of their connections. It’s a careful order that allows the pieces to function intricately as one. Harmony may be among life’s tougher puzzles, one we’re still trying to solve in our own ways. But as Mari surely knows, you can capture it, if even for just a moment – that’s the beauty of a toy.
Thanks for reading!