Atrium House

The brief

The owners had been searching the neighbourhood for two years for a brownstone that worked for their family. They couldn’t find one. So they bought a 25-foot-wide lot and asked us to build something that felt like a brownstone but functioned for the way they actually live: open ground floor with a real kitchen, atrium that brings light to the centre, separate workshop on the lower level for one of the owners’ pottery practice.

Constraints: a strict R6B zoning envelope, neighbours on both sides, and a budget that ruled out a glass-skinned modernist solution. We needed something that read as continuous with the historic block but breathed for the family inside it.

The move

The atrium is the whole project. A 22-foot-tall central void with a single rooflight pulls daylight all the way down to the ground floor. The kitchen, living, and dining wrap around it. Every room in the house has at least two sources of natural light because of how the atrium puts light at the centre rather than only on the perimeter.

We pulled colour and texture from the brick of the existing block — the brick on the north and south façades is a custom blend that reads as continuous with the brownstones either side at street level, but the rear façade gives way to corten + double-height glazing for the garden.

What we’re proudest of

The schedule held. We were permitted in 11 months (DOB + Landmarks consultation), built in 10. Zero change orders to the client — everything we hit in the field, we absorbed against contingency or solved through alternates that didn’t move the contract value. That’s the work.