Studio Maignan Architects Opens Up a 1930s Toronto Brick House and Crowns It with a Glass-Gabled Loft

Toronto's interwar brick houses are a quiet problem for architects. They are solid, well-built and well-loved, and they were designed around a way of living that no longer fits most families: small rooms, closed doors, a kitchen at the back and a garden you see through a single window. The C+C House, by Studio Maignan Architects in the Humewood Cedarvale neighbourhood, takes on one of these 1930s houses and keeps it rather than replacing it. The project is framed as adaptive reuse, and the brief appears to have been simple to state and hard to execute: undo the compartmentalized plan without erasing the house the street already knows.

What interests us is where the intervention happens. From the sidewalk, the original brick still does most of the talking, with a new black-clad gabled top floor added above it. Inside and at the rear, the house changes completely. Timber joists are exposed, a stair with open treads becomes the vertical spine, and a sequence of decks and terraces stacks up toward the tree canopy. Led by Stephanie Maignan with Stacie Vos, the project shows that a renovation can be radical where it counts and restrained where restraint is a courtesy to the neighbours.

A Hipped Roof Becomes a Gabled Crown

The archival photograph matters here. The original was a plain two-storey brick box under a hipped roof, the kind of house that lines dozens of streets in midtown Toronto. Studio Maignan kept the brick base and replaced the roofline with a dark, gabled upper volume. The move adds a full level of usable space while reading as a familiar house shape rather than a flat-topped addition.

The black cladding carries the new work and the brick carries the old, so the two are never confused. The project's listed products include Enviroshake composite cladding and Chateau windows, though we can't confirm exactly where each was used. At dusk the result is more domestic than dramatic: lit windows, a balcony with someone standing on it, a timber front door. Additions on streets like this one often try to be noticed, and this one mostly tries to fit in.

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