House with plywood interiors
dezeen.com reviews a house in the Plateau (actually, a converted duplex, so that’s one fewer residential space) completely decorated in bare plywood and white paint and finishes. Makes me want to reach for a pot of red paint.
mare 23:58 on 2022-04-17 Permalink
It starts well: “The 140-square-metre (459-square-foot) house […]”
459 square foot is 42 square metre, which is even for Plateau standards very small. So it’s probably 140 square metre which makes it more than 1500 square foot.
(dezeen’s review process of their ‘reviews’ must be very thorough.)
Janet 07:41 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
Well, it doesn’t have a breakfast bar…
Kate 09:50 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
Janet, we don’t get a good view of the kitchen. I’d still bet 60-40 that there’s a breakfast bar in there, in stark white of course.
mare, it’s two entire floors of a duplex, so 1500m2 must be closer to it. I did briefly think the numbers sounded odd but I’m not accustomed to seeing building space cited in metric.
Meezly 09:58 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
Why TF would anyone want a stark, all-white bathroom, let alone a kitchen? (rhetorical question, as I know most people have no taste). It looks like the shower room of an insane asylum.
DeWolf 10:30 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
The plywood is beautifully done. But it’s very hard to imagine someone actually living in this space…
Ian 10:38 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
I thought conversions of this type were illegal in the Plateau now?
Though Plante got to do one on her property so I guess there’s ways around everything if you know the right people.
Kate 11:34 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
The article links to a couple of other works by this firm. This one is really something.
Ian, I don’t know the actual wording of the bylaw. But I’d be willing to bet there are loopholes, something like if the upstairs apartment was empty for a year you could do what you wanted with it. So all you’d have to do is turf your tenant, get by for a year with no rental revenue – the people who transformed that building wouldn’t likely feel the pinch – and then bring in the men with the sledgehammers.
Ephraim 11:43 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
If you have a big place and want to subdivide it, the Plateau charges you a percent of the land value… thereby discouraging people from subdividing… as well.
Joey 13:54 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
@Ephraim I think the division tax has been eliminated (used to be that dividing into a co-property involved paying a “park tax” equivalent to 10% of the land value). I suspect the loophole for taking over another dwelling in a duplex/triplex involves undivided co-properties – just a hunch.
Robert H 14:04 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
The evolution of The Plateau into Montreal’s equivalent of Manhattan’s west village complete with design statement townhouses continues apace. I’m not a fan of white brick in winter latitudes. Red brick provides a warm note during the bleak, cold months when all the colour seems to have bled out of the urban streetscape. The interior looks better than I envisioned reading Kate’s description; as DeWolf said, the plywood is beautifully done. But all those pristine planes, angles and fragments, I don’t want to live inside a cubist sculpture. The other Verville (the current chic atelier of choice?) house Kate referenced appealed more to me, the interior at least (the exterior is a blight). The metal grille over the light well is a stylish feature that adds visual interest to another cold, austere exercise in aesthetic purity. The architect wants to innovate and avoid cliché, but the interiors especially seem forbidding and unwelcoming. I’d walk in and be reluctant to sit down, expecting a docent in a jacket with a name tag to appear and politely chide me for planting my behind on the latest installation. Sorry if I sound like such an architectural reactionary, as if I wanted all the Plateau to look like some sort of greystone and redbrick mansard-roofed theme park. A few of these places here and there create an intriguing contrast, but imagine a whole neighborhood.
CE 14:06 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
I walk by this house all the time and have peeked in the windows a couple times. The photos make it look a lot better than what it looks like in reality.
Spi 14:19 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
Can someone explain to me why people are so eager to critique a strangers living accommodations?
What does it say about them that they have such strong opinions about a space they’ve never actually seen let alone will have to live in.
For the most part we don’t go around criticizing or sharing our vision of publicly accessible spaces but when it’s someones private domain, watch out the design police is here.
Robert H 15:45 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
It’s pretty basic, Spi: how to live or in this case, what to live in, is one of those fundamental subjects. I find it fascinating and I enjoy playing design arbiter, but neither I nor anyone else is randomly entering strangers’ homes and dressing them down about their taste or standards. A profile with photos of a residence was published in a design magazine/website with the intention that some reaction be elicited: mission accomplished. We can all express our approval or disapproval, which of course is irrelevant to the proprietor. It’s all part of the glorious kaleidoscope of human preference. I have even stronger opinions about public spaces and buildings–don’t get me started on what happened to Windsor station. But there’s nothing strange or unseemly about our discussion here.
Em 16:46 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
From the article: “The project has become the expression of an inhabitable wood sculpture,’ the architect added.”
Sounds…cozy.
Kate 17:42 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
Spi, I wouldn’t randomly critique the dwelling of a friend or acquaintance, but when a newly redesigned interior is put up on the web, it’s like any other aesthetic product, a painting or a movie or an art exhibit. It’s there to be looked at and commented on.
Or what Robert H wrote more stylishly than I did.
Spi 17:53 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
@Robert there’s quite a gulf between having personal preferences and expressing alternative ideas to design choices and making snarky comments about the popularity of breakfast bars and drawing a comparison to an insane asylum. The later no longer being about the actual subject in question but much more about casting a judgemental view on other people’s preference and lives.
EmilyG 18:43 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
They made a duplex into this…. thing… partly to have extra-high ceilings?
They eliminated an extra living space, partly for that.
Seems to me to be quite an expression of privilege.
Tim S. 19:18 on 2022-04-18 Permalink
On one hand, it’s a personal preference. I wouldn’t want to live in this house, but I wouldn’t mind visiting it now and again and I’m glad it exists, if just to think about. Also, I like colourful exteriors, but white doesn’t count.
On the other hand, many of us live in places that were designed by other people, and don’t have the choice, either because of money, effort or tenancy agreements, to change them. So if there’s something that you don’t like that’s becoming very common, it’s a form of self-interest to push back.
Meezly 00:15 on 2022-04-19 Permalink
I think everyone save one has been on point with the actual subject. I’ve lived on the Plateau for many years and never lived in any other neighbourhood in Montreal. Rented two places for quite some time before hubs and I bought our first condo a while ago. It was very hard even then to find homes on the Plateau that weren’t overly renovated or gutted to some extent. Some would call it progress I guess, but seeing beautiful fixtures and solid wooden doors and frames left as garbage on the street, well, it does piss me off at times. I’m certainly not going to let someone make me feel bad for being snarky and judgemental when I see a converted duplex that sticks out like a soulless sterile stark white thumb on a street lined with warm brick buildings, has contributed to one less residence while speeding gentrification along in my hood, and is publicly expressing their privilege in a fancy design site.