City Home 2014 toronto life 15

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Masters of the House

Toronto’s top design professionals share their

sourcing secretsby e l i z a bet h pagl i ac ol o

the furniture

designer p. 18

the retailer p. 20

the interior

designers p. 21

the landscape

architect p. 16

the residential

architects p. 17

Landscape architect Victoria Taylor in

her home office

the expertsthe experts

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THE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT

the experts

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1. The Biodiversity Starter Pack from St. Williams Nursery. It comes with native Ontario flowering perennials.

2. Marité Acosta’s ceramics. She crafts her stoneware bowls and plates by hand.

3. Loll Designs’ Lollygagger lounge chair, which is made from recycled milk jugs.

4. Dirt sculptures—dirt bricks adorned with native wild seeds. Taylor’s boyfriend, chef Jamie Kennedy, has nine of them on his farm.

5. The modular desk and shelving system by Atlas Industries.

6. Easy Tiger, a Dundas West shop that carries eco-friendly cosmetics, jewellery and ceramics.

Toronto garden obsessives first encountered Victoria Taylor’s work at the 2012 Canada Blooms festival, where she won awards for a craggy instal-lation of waste concrete sprouted with Queen Anne’s lace, staghorn sumac and dried ornamental grasses. Since then, Taylor—who’s dating locavore chef and fellow eco-crusader Jamie Kennedy—has been creating shabby-gorgeous gardens across town. For a home in the Annex, she brightened a dark garden with light-reflective gravel, service-berry trees and birches, and a chrome-plated sculpture. And on a condo balcony at One Bedford, she installed custom bronze-finished planters to match bronze accents in the home and created a boxwood screen to block out the chaos of the traffic below. When she’s not greening residential spaces, she’s planting rooftop gardens for places like the College Street YMCA and the Parkdale restaurant Parts and Labour.

Victoria TaylorThe green-obsessed gardenista finds beauty in concrete, gravel and weeds

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Blacklab is one of several new architectural firms replacing Toronto’s traditional Victorian dwellings with sleek, jutting boxes that feature expansive windows, eco-friendly textures and open layouts. The company was established in 2012 by two couples, shown above from left: Tony Round and Andrea Kordos, and Joe and Sarah Knight. Each mod design is unique and custom-tailored to the client, but the architects always try to incorporate eco-techniques—solar shading, orientation and natural cooling—to make their houses as efficient as they are beautiful. To wit: a coach house on Georgian Bay, finished in Corten steel, reclaimed barn-board and board-formed concrete. The family loved the house so much that they made it their primary residence.

Blacklab ArchitectsThe hip young firm is filling the city’s streets with eco-friendly modernist homes

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1. Bertazzoni ovens. They come in several colours and brighten up a neutral kitchen.

2. Endangered Species lights by Phillip Toesev, assembled from industrial, off-the-shelf bulbs and materials.

3. Montreal studio Samare’s simple, refined Mush! lounge chair. 4. Déchirer tiles by Mutina. The firm recently used them in lieu of wallpaper.

5. Porch Modern, an e-boutique that carries mid-century modern Harry Bertoia sculptures.

THE RESIDENTIALARCHITECTS

Her Current ObsessiOns tHeir Current ObsessiOns