By Rosie Prata
Photography by Stephani Buchman
This project has a lot of meaning to me, personally, and to our firm,” says Harvey Wise, principal along with Robin Nadel at Toronto firm Wise Nadel Design. “We meet some clients for the first time and they become friends or repeat clients, and we’re in each other’s lives for years.” For his clients on Glen Cedar Road, however, the connection was especially meaningful.
“I helped them decorate and furnish their first apartment after they got married,” Wise says, explaining that he first worked with the couple while he was still attending graduate school. “I didn’t even know that at the time this was going to be my future career path.”
Years later, they moved to the Glen Cedar property in 1999 and asked Wise to work his magic again. “It was an old English Tudor-style house that was probably built in the 1930s,” Wise says of the property’s original character. “They hired me to do their renovation, which I did at the time with Richard Little from Urban Innovations.” The couple was one of Little’s first clients, too. Over the years, Wise returned to Glen Cedar a few times to make updates here and there: some tweaks to the children’s rooms as they grew up, a facelift for the master suite, an upgrade for the kitchen. As the family’s needs changed, Wise orchestrated delicate design ministrations to ensure their home adapted along with them.
Two decades after the family had moved into Glen Cedar, they flirted with the idea of tearing the house down and doing a custom build, bespoke from the ground up; a design was even drafted but it ended up sitting on the back burner. The clients also looked at other homes but ultimately loved where they were too much to leave.
Then, the pandemic struck, and the couple—now grandparents—decided to tear down the existing house and go for a full new build. They rehired Little, their original contractor, and work began on constructing their dream home, hand in hand with Wise, of course. “It was really quite full circle to be able to build this new house with them,” Wise says.
The original home was stately and traditional with dark wood, panelling and warm tones of brown, taupe and beige. “For this house, we were able to completely reinvent things,” Wise says. The new design is clean, serene and more contemporary—a total refresh. “When you’ve lived in a house for 25 years that is a 90-year-old home and you get to tear down and rebuild new, it’s like you’re in a candy store,” he says.
The home’s layout has been designed to welcome the couple’s grown-up kids, along with their spouses and children, and to spend quality time together as a family. The large house comfortably accommodates the whole gang, including the couple’s two big fluffy dogs.
The first floor encompasses a dining room, living room, spacious kitchen, breakfast room and family room. The family room is especially cozy, with a huge, U-shaped sectional sofa facing a large television screen installed on an exquisite, book-matched stone linear fireplace—the ideal space to pile in and watch a football game together. “The rooms all flow very nicely from one to the other,” Wise says. “And the kitchen is really at the heart of the whole house, right in the middle.”
In the kitchen, the palette is light, fresh, bright and crisp. A large marbled centre island is used as a preparation surface, serving station and seating area. Behind it, a servery conceals appliances and makes for an out-of-the-way space for meal prep, entertaining or catering, maximizing beauty and function. “It just really works,” Wise says.
The palette of greys is consistent throughout the home, with Wise using a variety of materials and finishes to expertly create multidimensional texture and warmth. “The hardwood throughout the house is a warm, smoky colour, and we
kept the trim a fresh, soft off-white,” he says. “The rooms
themselves are different combinations of greys, usually punctuated with white and charcoal.”
Throughout, the attention to detail is extraordinary, with built-in millwork in the living room, a zebrawood table in the dining room and blown-glass light fixtures that are works of art in themselves. Custom-designed pieces by AM Studio illuminate the dining and kitchen tables, while a fixture by Ridgely Studio Works lights the stairwell. “There are very few pieces that were not done to our custom specifications, right down to the front-door grille,” Wise says.
One detail from the old house has remained, installed on the wall of the marble-floored wine cellar on the home’s lower level. It’s a photograph taken by the owners “the day after the old house was demolished” Wise reveals. While a new house stands where the old house once was, it still holds a trove of family memories that will continue to multiply. This small feature is a highly personal memento that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the home’s intimately crafted new life.