Marlborough House | superkül

Marlborough House offers a welcoming and airy space to a previously dark, semi-detached house in midtown Toronto. The conversion of the house from a small, typical single family home to one that accommodates the work and living spaces of two professionals and those of their university-aged children revolved around opening the house up and making multi-purpose spaces out of what were once discrete and single-purpose rooms. The goal of the project was to maintain a sustainable, small-footprint urban home.

Essential to the project was a commitment to preserve and enhance how the house fit into its urban context and how it would be understood as part of a larger and coherent streetscape. At the same time, the client wanted to ensure that the house had more expansive views and dramatically improved natural lighting. To this end, the design approach revolved around enlarging the windows and adding a light shaft, maintaining exterior datum lines and building massing to match the streetscape, re-interpreting the dark trim and window frames in a modern idiom and creating an airy, bright, efficient and sustainable urban home.