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Located in Toronto’s Baby Point neighborhood, the Baby Point Residence is an addition/ renovation project comprising re-organization, structural renovation, opening up of the existing design plan and addition of a master bedroom suite and a kitchen.
The Baby Point district id presently under study as a heritage conservation district in Toronto. It is presumed that the area was forever settled in the year 1673 as the village of Teiaiagon, which means ‘it crosses the stream’ also the occupation this area dating back to 6000 BCE. By the early 1820s, 1500acres of the land was bought by renowned French-Canadian merchant James Baby for his estate. The government acquired the land in 1910 for military purposes.
The Government changed the plans and sold the land to developer Robert Home Smith. In 1912 his garden suburb was developed and was marketed as “a bit of England far from England”. This course was marked by an obsession with Medieval Revival, and the Arts and Crafts movement, so many of the original homes developed in the neighbourhood were in the English Cottage or Tudor Revival style. Home Smith had precise guidelines about the standards of the neighbourhood where the layouts of every new home required to be approved by his architects. His development assured the natural topography of the land was retained to produce picturesque sites for each home.
The heritage status of the neighbourhood is yet under study. The clients for Baby Point Residence had interest in the Arts and Crafts movement, and preserving neighbourhood quality, so the architects strove to grasp the basic principles of the movement. Beyond Medieval motifs, ornamentation, and a yearning for handcraftsmanship, they too described the Arts and Crafts movement spatially. They understood it to be about creation of immersive and surrounding spaces through rich, warm materials and tones and the comprehensive sense of weight; also, organization of an open floor plan into intimate sub-spaces each formed around a definite activity and expressed through furniture built into a thickened wall.
