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As Toronto grows ever more sophisticated, and its downtown more affluent, it’s inevitable that established residential neighbourhoods will change. But even as revitalized interiors become more and more the norm, the idea of going the full Monty – tearing down an outdated 1920s city home and starting over – can be traumatic for the rest of the street, especially if your dream house is Modernist. This handsome new house in the Roncesvalles area by Altius Architects is a splendid example of how it can be done with sensitivity, but even so, it initially faced considerable opposition.

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There’s a received wisdom that streetscapes should be consistent, and since whole swaths of the city were built during a feverish period between about 1910 and 1930, many of our downtown streets are lined with houses that are remarkably similar. But since then, pretty much everything else about life in the city has changed radically. It’s becoming rare now to find a house that hasn’t undergone at least some renovation over its life, from simply upgrading the windows and furnace, to total gut-and-rebuilds that retain nothing of the original but the façade.

“Through the ’80s and ’90s, the vast majority of our work was adding a kitchen and family room onto the back of the house,” recalls Altius principal architect Graham Smith. “It’s a reaction to the formal layout of so many traditional homes, with the living room and dining room at the front and the kitchen on the back. But then everyone inevitably ends up in the kitchen, so why do you even need a living room? And the idea of the breakfast nook, with another table 15 feet away in the dining room, is even more absurd.”