Giannone Petricone Associates Wraps North Toronto's Oldest House in a Veil of Curved Glass

Snider House has stood near Yonge Street and Duplex Avenue since 1828. It began as a one-and-a-half-storey brick Regency Cottage among pastures and orchards, and it is now recognised as North Toronto's oldest surviving building, designated under the Ontario Heritage Act in 1979. Over roughly 180 years it was enlarged, subdivided for different occupants and gradually surrounded by the city. For its 2025 renovation and extension, Giannone Petricone Associates Inc. Architects worked with heritage consultant ERA Architects. The team stripped away the accumulated additions, which the architects call the "barnacles", and rebuilt the porches, entry and roofline. They then attached a two-storey rear addition made almost entirely of curved, argon-filled glass fabricated by Cricursa in Spain.

The material choice has a clear source. The client, Jody Cash, is a third-generation glass specialist and manufacturer. That background could easily have produced a showroom bolted onto a museum piece. What makes the project worth studying is that the glass does real planning work. The original masonry box sits slightly skewed toward Yonge Street, out of line with a lot that runs perpendicular to Duplex Avenue. The undulating rear wall absorbs that misalignment, so the old house can stay rigid and symmetrical while the new work takes up the slack between building and site.

Restoring the Regency Box

From the street, the work is deliberately quiet. The red brick front, the columned porch and the white balcony read as one composed elevation again, and the porch, which had been lost, has been reconstructed rather than imitated loosely. The masonry was structurally consolidated, and the roof was brought back to its hipped profile. You see a cottage that looks less renovated than recovered.

Inside the original volume, the plan keeps its axial order, and the ground floor rooms are finished in white. The interventions are small and well judged. A rounded arched opening frames a fireplace faced in grey book-matched marble with brown veining. The softened edge hints at the curves waiting at the back of the house without disrupting the formality of the front rooms.

A Glass Veil at the Garden Edge

At the rear, the addition reads as a hung veil rather than a wall. The glass units are suspended from above in the manner of a curtain wall, held in aluminum frames by Antamex/Quest Windows and capped with Rheinzinc metal roofing. Green panels interrupt the glazing at intervals, so the elevation never becomes a single glossy sheet. At dusk the lit interior makes the curves legible from across the pool.

The detail that matters most is at the floor line. A slim metal channel runs where the curved glass meets the timber deck, so the interior floor and the terrace read as nearly one surface. The deck and the raised pool sit level with the ground floor. Putting the pool above grade also reduced excavation and disturbance on a heritage site, which counts as a practical benefit as well as a visual one.

Kitchen and Dining in the Curve

The kitchen is where old and new geometry meet most directly. A walnut cabinet wall with rounded corners separates it from the dining room. It bends to follow the logic of the addition, and a pebble-grey marble column, back-painted glass and Corian surfaces keep the palette restrained. The curving glass edge looks out over a brick garden, so the original material stays in view from inside the new work.

The dining room stays within the more traditional order of the house, with a bay window, a dark table and green leather chairs. Moving from that room into the kitchen, you leave a room with corners and enter a space bounded by a continuous bend. The sequence makes the old and new grammars legible without signage or a gasket of shadow gaps.

Felt, Leather and a Darker Register

The family room shifts tone sharply. Deep blue felt lines the curved walls, leather adds warmth, and the navy built-in shelving wraps around a grey sofa beside a glass corner. In a house so dependent on transparency, this is a necessary counterweight: a room meant to absorb sound and light rather than reflect them.

A narrow window slit cut into the brick lets a thin band of green daylight into the felt-lined space. It is a modest gesture, but it reminds you that the heritage shell is still wrapped around these rooms, even where the finishes have moved far from Regency precedent.

The Stair as Hinge

The architects enlarged the opening above the stair and gave it a curved outline, turning a circulation core into the point where the two halves of the house negotiate. White oak treads, white balusters and a leather-wrapped handrail and newel keep the stair materially consistent with the rest of the house. The looping ceiling cove repeats the plan geometry of the rear addition overhead.

From the foot of the stair, the hall pulls your eye toward a glazed garden door, so the vertical route also works as a view axis. Upstairs, the curved balustrade and amber wall pegs lead toward an arched window. Small domestic details like these keep the formal moves from feeling clinical.

A Primary Suite Among the Treetops

The primary suite occupies the upper level of the addition and follows a ribbon-like plan. Its curved walls pull back from the glass edge, which handles privacy better than blinds alone could. The bedroom draws light from several directions, and a built-in window seat in the glass corner sits at the height of the surrounding tree canopy.

The bathroom continues the theme at a smaller scale. A freestanding tub sits on a curving black mosaic inset that flows from the stone and mosaic floor inlays leading into the suite. The shower is wrapped in narrow white tiles that follow the bend. The geometry holds all the way down to the tile module, and that consistency is what separates this addition from a decorative glass wrapper.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows how far the ground was reshaped. The hip-roofed house sits at the center, with a rectangular pool on one side and a guitar-shaped lawn path on the other, and the landscape takes on the curvature of the addition. On the ground floor plan, the foyer, dining room and living room keep their axial arrangement around the central stair. The kitchen and family room sit beyond that core, enclosed by the curved rear deck.

The second floor plan shows the contrast clearly: the front bedrooms keep their orderly layout, while the primary suite, ensuite and closet bend toward the garden. The attic level holds a bedroom, an ensuite, a study and a small balcony pushed out from the hipped roof. Even the least visible floor has been put back into everyday use.

Why This Project Matters

Heritage additions in Canadian cities tend to fall into two habits: deferential boxes that apologise for being new, or loud contrasts that treat the old building as a backdrop. Snider House avoids both. The glass here is not just a contrasting material. It resolves a real site problem, the skew between the 1828 house and its lot, and it does so with a geometry the old masonry could never have produced. That gives the contrast a reason to exist beyond style.

The project also shows what close collaboration with a heritage consultant can deliver. Removing later accretions and rebuilding the lost porch let the original cottage read clearly again, and that clarity is what makes the curved addition legible as new. For architects working with designated structures, the lesson is to restore first and add second, so that the new work can be as different as it needs to be.

Snider House by Giannone Petricone Associates Inc. Architects, Toronto, Canada. Area: approximately 540 m² (5,812 ft²). Completed in 2025. Photography by Scott Norsworthy.

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