CANADIAN - Rundles

By David Lasker Photography by Michael Awad, James Dow and Steven Evans
Portfolio
Small but grand
A high-end residence and boathouse and a low-budget house and dining hall for a summer camp
showcase the exquisitely detailed, multi-layered work of Toronto’s Shim-Sutcliffe Architects.
And this makes 25. Does Robert Hill’s house look familiar? The modof the Victorian cottage, with its clapboard wood siding and intimate
est, 1,100-square-foot, $100,000 Toronto dwelling has appeared in 24
spaces. The upper level proclaims an industrial loft with high ceilings,
international books, periodicals and awards publications (excluding
generous lighting and open plan. “These two layers of skin, the lower
newspapers) since its completion in 1996. It won a Governor-General’s
and upper, slip past one another like interlocking hands,” Hill says.
Award, the Canadian Wood Council Award and the American Wood
“When you separate them, you create the openings for the glazing.”
Design Award.
Such disciplined, interOn the other hand, this
locking forms and geometrireview of work by Shimcal massing evoke Frank
Sutcliffe Architects boasts
Lloyd Wright and, in turn
an exclusive first look at
the Froebel building blocks
their dazzlingly virtuosic
that Wright played with as a
Cobourg Street House in
precocious child. (The
Ont.
The
Stratford,
maple blocks and pieces of
Muskoka Boathouse exemcoloured
paper
were
plifies another genre of the
arranged on a grid, encourhigh-end work by Brigitte
aging a sense of order.)
Shim and her husband and
Squint at the slender lally
business partner Howard
columns near the front door
Sutcliffe. It’s a boathouse
and you might see hints of
that only a Bay Street plutoH.H. Richardson’s Glessner
crat, as it happens, could
House in Chicago (1886),
afford. At the other budget
where the weight of the
extreme, Hill’s house and
massive stone façade threatMoorlands Camp, a skeletal
ens visually to overpower
dining hall in the woods for
the small columns. Shiminner-city kids, show that
Sutcliffe, of course, didn’t
Shim-Sutcliffe can eke the
copy those columns, with
most out of the almighty
their Romanesque-inspired
dollar.
shaft and capital, they reinSeated on the couch in
terpreted them. “That’s a
his upper-floor library, next
good
catch,”
Howard
to a tall model of the Empire
Sutcliffe admits, laughing at
State Building, Hill, an
the thought of a secret agenarchitectural historian and
da being found out. “We did
Facing page: The cantilevered balcony of this Muskoka boathouse covers the outdoor
archivist, relates how an
look at Glessner when we
boat slip. The trademark, Shim-Sutcliffe, Aalto-ish, wood-clad columns are repeated
American architecture magdesigned Robert’s house.”
throughout. Above: In a stylish update of the vernacular Muskoka décor, the sleeping
azine’s editor thanked him
An architectural Name
cabin transforms the traditional Victorian ceiling of beadboard (cottage-style, tonguefor sending the announcethat Tune detective could
and-groove panelling) into a shaped, Douglas fir ceiling. The curving form marks a rare
ment that it had won the
uncover an even more wideShim-Sutcliffe departure from rectilinearity. Photos by James Dow.
Canadian Wood award,
ranging pedigree. Shimalong with an intriguing image of the façade.
Sutcliffe’s love of wood joinery evokes turn-of-the-century California
“She thought it was a fascinating, visually captivating composiArts and Crafts architects such as Greene and Greene. Then there’s the
tion,” he says. Different parts of the cladding operate at two different
partners’ almost-fetishistic attention to exquisite details, such as the cirscales, each plentiful in Toronto. The ground floor operates at the scale
cular, sandblasted window-mirror in the bathroom of developer and
CANADIAN INTERIORS
31
Above: Snow on the south façade of Craven Road, with the front door, highlights the interlocking, double-scale wood cladding. The ground floor’s finer
wood siding evokes an intimate Victorian cottage. The upper floor’s larger,
manufactured plywood panels proclaim the industrial scale of the loft. Photo
by Steven Evans. Below: The upper-floor library, looking toward the street.
The stair balustrade offers storage for larger volumes; its surface serves as
layout space. Photo by James Dow.
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CANADIAN INTERIORS
longtime client Murray Frum. Such bold juxtapositions of diverse materials and mannered details harks back to the late Italian architect Carlo
Scarpa.
“I think Carlo Scarpa is always looking over their shoulder,” Hill
says. “It’s in the inventiveness of the detailing and the fastidious attention to elements, from small-scale, such as a doorknob or window handle, to large – the whole façade – and back again. They’re always thinking on two levels.”
Wright, Greene and Greene, Scarpa: we’re just getting warm. The
Nordic wood tradition, too, has influenced Shim-Sutcliffe’s work. In
1994, the partners toured Scandinavia and made a pilgrimage to the
important Aalvar Aalto projects. The Finnish master tempered stark,
machine-oriented Modernism and its industrial-looking materials with
the sensuality and tactile intimacy of natural products such as wood.
Shim-Sutcliffe shares Aalto’s fondness for screens made of wood
strips, seen here in the entry to Rundles restaurant in Stratford. In their
own house and the Muskoka Boathouse, they pay homage to the
columns supporting the overhanging roof in the courtyard of Aalto’s
Finnish Pavilion at the 1936-37 Paris International Exhibition. They’re
dressed up with slender vertical strips that foreshadow a similar treatment along the Front Street facade of Hummingbird Centre (1956-60;
formerly O’Keefe Centre) by Earle Morgan with Page & Steele.
One could go on about touches, here and there, of the poetry and
lyricism of Sweden’s Sigurd Lewerentz; a sensitivity to sight and light
recalling Norway’s Sverre Fehn; and a fondess for the dramatic, asymmetrical massing of geometrical forms associated with Holland’s
Willem Dudok. And that’s just the architecture. As furniture and product designers, Shim and Sutcliffe have created Virtu award-winning
lights, chairs and tables. They are also notable landscape designers. But
these are stories are for another day.
Suffice it to say that Shim-Sutcliffe packs enough double-entendre,
playful, enigmatic layers of complexity into even a small building that
design cognoscenti, including some unlikely ones, are beating a path to
their door. They recently started schematic design for a new prayer
space, and related landscaping, for 400 nuns at the Adrian Dominican
Sisters’s mother-house complex in Adrian, Mich.
Interviewed at the firm’s cozy studio in east-end Toronto, surrounded by project models and experimental, full-scale façade mockups, Brigitte Shim is talking about the division of labour between
Sutcliffe and herself. “We work collaboratively through all the stages of
a project. Either one is as likely to do any part of it as the other,” she
says.”
Still, the two play their distinctive roles. Shim is the academic. A
University of Toronto professor since 1988, she has lectured frequently
at Harvard. This fall semester, she’s in New Haven one day a week as
William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor of Architecture and the
Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Yale. Last March, she delivered the Ray and Charles Eames lecture at the University of Michigan at
Ann Arbor; sponsor Herman Miller will publish a monograph on the
firm’s work.
Sutcliffe is the hand’s-on guy, rolling up his sleeves on a job site and
instructing the contractors on last-minute adjustments. “Howard loves to
get his hands dirty. He’s fascinated with the process of fabrication and
making decisions that can’t be made in the office,” Hill says, describing
a classic shot of Sutcliffe in his welder’s helmet and holding a torch.
“When they were building my house, he brought his concrete saw
November/December 2001
Left: The tower-like Cobourg Street house, for restaurateur James Morris, rises over his existing Rundles restaurant, an earlier Shim-Sutcliffe project. The
house is built of wood frame with steel structural elements and is clad with concrete panels and wood siding. Right: This view toward the bedroom and,
below, a glimpse of the living room and the small window near the fireplace. The house is organized around a central light court; the stair moves to connect
the ever-changing floor levels. The front of the house has three, 10-feet-high floors; the south two eight-foot-high floors and a double-height floor of 161/2
feet. Photos by James Dow.
and decided how to resolve the junction of the concrete and the wood in
front. He’s interested in how corners meet. Howard, his assistant and I
did the cutting and painting and installation right then and there. He also
carefully spaced and checked the half-inch gaps between the boards.
“Very few architects would do this because they’re usually sitting in
an office preparing contract documents or arguing with clients. I can’t
imagine Richard Meier, for instance, getting down on his hands and
knees to prepare something.”
The partners’ disinclination to delegate authority will probably preclude pursuit of projects larger than their Ledbury Park (1998), a threeacre civic recreation complex in north Toronto. Total staff complement
will likely remain at the present six members.
Shim was born in Kingston, Jamaica; Sutcliffe in England. Both
studied at the University of Waterloo. Subsequently, Shim worked in the
office of Baird Sampson before founding her own practice in 1986;
Sutcliffe worked at Ron Thom, Barton Myers, and Kuwabara Payne
McKenna Blumberg. They established Shim-Sutcliffe Architects in
1997.
Craven Road House
Because many of their clients wish to remain anonymous, Shim and
Sutcliffe name their buildings after the location, not the client. Thus,
they refer to Hill’s house as “Craven Road House”; James Morris’s
house next to Rundle’s restaurant is “Cobourg Street House.”
Robert Hill is a passionate collector of architectural books and
posters. At the outset of the design process, he told Shim and Sutcliffe
the number of books, card catalogues and flat files that needed to be
accommodated. He also spoke of the airy, light-filled work room he
desired and the warmth and intimacy he wanted for the living spaces.
The house occupies an odd, leftover lot on a street with garages on
one side and houses on the other. The entrance is located in the middle
of the building, reducing the amount of wasted, inefficient circulation
space in the residence and workspace.
On this point, the layout diverges sharply from that of the typical
side-hall Toronto house on a narrow downtown lot. In this scenario, the
staircase leads from the entry up to the back of the house, where it’s dark
and gloomy. Then one doubles back and walks down an awkwardly narrow hallway leading to the bedrooms.
At Craven Road, Shim-Sutcliffe flipped the stair so that one
ascends toward light. At the top of the stairs, they eliminated the corridor, enabling Hill to exploit the floor plate’s full 17-foot width. The 25foot wide property allowed a side yard on the south side to be carved out,
affording the ground floor views onto an outdoor garden.
The juxtaposition of Victorian and loft styles appears in the contrasting spaces within the house. The lower floor has a seven-foot-six
ceiling height and a polychrome palette; the upper floor has a 12-foot
ceiling height and is painted white and lined with bookshelves.
Shim-Sutcliffe worked with the contractor to eke out the slender,
$100,000 construction budget by refining the wood-frame and concreteblock building system. Still, there was money left over for custom elements, including a skylight over the stair, mahogany windows and an
exterior copper light that contrasts with the otherwise simple detailing.
Cobourg Street House, Stratford
Modernists Shim-Sutcliffe may be, but not formalists. You can draw a
line down the middle of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth house or his
Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and observe the bilateral symmetry. Not so with Shim-Sutcliffe, whose asymmetrical strucCANADIAN INTERIORS
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Above: At Moorlands Camp, the dining hall’s main space measures 36 feet by 100 feet. The porch extends beyond the building by two bays to provide a large,
covered outdoor area for camp activities. The exterior’s natural cedar siding will weather over time. Hinged, eight-foot, wooden brise-soleil panels provide
summer shading; they unhook to facilitate winter closing for the non-winterized structure. A motorized greenhouse glazing system runs along the roof ridge,
bringing in light and flow-through ventilation. Photo by Michael Awad.
tures have an air of spontaneity and mystery.
These traits abound at Cobourg House in Stratford, which exemplifies the partners’ attitude to natural light. “They don’t let it just come in
the window, they like filtering it and playing with it,” says Hill, who
enjoys the effect of a skylight in his own house. “They like indirect and
reflected light. They always think about where the light is coming from.
They like to place the source outside your plane of vision. You sense that
there is light around the corner but don’t see it.”
The colour scheme moves in tandem with the rising light levels:
grey at the lower level and a gradually lightening blue as one moves up
the stairs.
A section view through the house reveals another component in the
feeling of surprise. Each room is on a different level and has a different
relationship to the other rooms across the central light court. At the front
of the house there are three, 10-feet-high floors. The south end has two
eight-foot-high floors and one double-height floor of 161/2 feet. “Even
though the house is vertical, it seems less vertical on the inside because
you only go up short flights at a time,” said its owner, James Morris, during a house tour in September. “The angles and the openness make the
house look bigger than its 1,800 square feet. “The ceiling height gives
the rooms twice the volume.”
These are sculptured, layered spaces, with intimacy playing off
against something grand. None of this is obvious from the outside.
Indeed, the window placement compounds the mystery. Perhaps this
explains why “townies” are not amused. “The general opinion in the
town is that this is a very ugly house,” Morris says. “Little old ladies who
live in the buildings at each side would rather look at something traditional.”
From inside, though, the fenestration makes perfect sense. “The
bedroom is oriented to the east and the living room to the west, so you
get light the first thing in the morning when you wake up, and the last
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CANADIAN INTERIORS
thing in the afternoon and evening in the living room,” Morris says. “It
works really well.”
The house was recently completed. Shim-Sutcliffe’s renovation of
the adjoining Rundles restaurant dates from 1999. Morris, the client for
both projects, opened Rundles in 1977. The pre-eminent eatery in
Stratford, feeding 100 diners in three rooms, the white-raftered Rundles
is renowned for what The Globe and Mail food critic Joann Kates calls
its “mouth-watering gastronomical menus” and the waiters’ spiffy uniforms by Toronto’s Hoax Couture. Morris is also the co-founder of the
influential Stratford Chefs School (even Stratford’s sandwich shops are
great).
How did Shim-Sutcliffe get the gig? In 1994, the McMichael
Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., featured photos and a model
of the firm’s Frum garden pavilion and fountain. Morris saw it, liked
what he saw, visited the project through a change of seasons (Frum was
a member of the Festival Theatre’s board and a friend of Morris) and
was won over. “Murray spoke very highly of Brigitte and Howard. He
called them ‘these two kids.’ ”
Morris asked for “a small but grand house,” with high ceilings. The
materials palette contrasts smooth (painted drywall) and rough (wood
slats and stylish stud walls). “We had to plan the location of every nail,”
Morris says.
The house is built of wood frame with steel structural elements and
is clad with concrete panels and wood siding. The house forms a small
tower overlooking swan-filled Lake Victoria to the north and a small
garden court and laneway to the south.
The living room faces the lake. “We’re almost at same level as the
lake, so you get the illusion of being closer to it than you actually are,”
Morris says.
As for budget figures, Shim says, “I have no idea. Jim essentially
built it himself and acted as the general contractor.” Morris says, “the
November/December 2001
budget evolved. I don’t know what it cost.” A happy client, indeed.
Moorlands Camp dining hall
Moorlands Camp is located on Lake Kawagama in the Haliburton
Highlands, a section of the Canadian Shield filled with small lakes and
conifer and deciduous forests. Sitting on a peninsula jutting into the lake,
the camp is accessible only by boat or floatplane. Downtown
Churchworkers Association, a non-profit Toronto charity, operates the
camp and brings disadvantaged inner-city children to the camp for a
wilderness experience to develop self-esteem and life skills.
Sutcliffe’s links to the place reach back to the 1970s, when he was
a counselor there. His firm has provided design and building services for
other buildings on the site, and when the existing, 60-year-old dining
hall became structurally unsafe, his firm created its replacement, completed in June, 2000.
“Everything had to be barged in. It’s basic construction,” he says.
“Because this is a summer building only, there was no need for insulation. This gave us the possibility of doing exposed framing, which was
very appealing.”
In the dining hall, 12 glulam (glued, laminated timber) trusses combine with small-scale lumber and light steel elements to create a
metaphoric wooden tent and structural-truss lantern. A skylight running
along the roof ridge floods the interior with daylight. The motorized
glazing lifts up, greenhouse-style, to vent the space. “Depending on the
cross breezes, you can open one or both leaves. There’s no need for air
conditioning.”
Muskoka boathouse
On the southwestern shore of Lake Muskoka, two hours north of
Toronto in prime cottage country, Shim-Sutcliffe built a boathouse,
completed in late 1999, that strikes a balance between Modernism and
the vernacular of ornate Victorian cottages and custom mahogany
launches. They call it “a sophisticated hut in the wilderness,” likening it
to Le Corbusier’s rustic cabin in southern France, and the Adirondack
camps built by robber barons at the dawn of the 20th century in upstate
New York.
The program called for two indoor boat slips and a covered outdoor
boat slip; storage for marine equipment; a sleeping cabin with kitchenette, shower and bath area; a bedroom-sitting room; and several outdoor porches and terraces, including a moss garden.
The heavy timber outer walls were milled from reclaimed industrial beams and assembled with traditional log-cabin methods. Indeed, the
partners here speak of the timber wrapper as an overcoat protecting the
intricately crafted sleeping cabin. “We put very rough elements, such as
heavy timbers, near refined elements. It’s like the landscape itself, contrasting with the boats and houses,” Shim says, putting a metaphoric spin
on one of her firm’s most intriguing projects.
The project teams included Don Chong and Jason Emory-Groen
(Cobourg Street House), Jason Emery-Groen (Moorelands Camp
Dining Hall) and Andrew Chatham and John O’Conner (Muskoka
Boathouse).
Sources:
Cobourg Street House, Stratford:
Cement-board cladding: Pyrok
Above: In the bathroom of the Muskoka boathouse, mahogany duckboard (a
temporary walkway made of wooden boards laid over a wet or muddy area
to form a raised path) echoes the typical Muskokan boat deck. The sinks are
rustic, ceramic teahouse washbasins with drain holes cut into the bottoms.
Photo by James Dow.
Contractor: Dan Paul Design Build
Exterior sculpture: Victor Tinkl
Hardware: HTL
Interior stone: Enmar Stone
Lighting: Eurolite
Mechanical engineer: Toews Engineering
Plumbing fixtures: Chicago Faucets
Structural engineer: Blackwell Engineering
Windows: Loewen Windows
Craven Road House:
Builder: Ptarmigan Construction
Millwork: Radiant City Millworks
Structural engineer: Onen & Hayta
Moorelands Camp Dining Hall:
Builder: Gord Mclean
Electrical engineer: Carinci Burt Rogers
Greenhouse skylight: Jonkman & Sons
Plywood floor sealer: BonaTech
Roofing: Vicwest Barnmaster
Structural engineer: Blackwell Engineering
Translucent panels: Graham
Muskoka Boathouse:
Contractor: Judges Contracting
Custom mahogany windows, millwork: Radiant City Millworks
Mechanical engineer: Toews Engineering
Plumbing fixtures: Chicago Faucets
Roof installation: Victorian Metals
Structural engineer: Atkins and Van Groll
Zinc roofing tile: Rheinzinc
CANADIAN INTERIORS
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