A Toronto designer who stepped away from high-end interiors pivots to a more socially minded housing project
is slow in arriving. At 15 minutes, he’s covered only his studies in industrial design at Humber College, his subsequent job working under the award-winning Mark Müller at Toronto’s Nienkamper, and why he quit.
“I was 27 when I left,” he says with a smile, “and at 27 you know enough but you also know nothing. … I had huge ambitions. ” When designing bespoke furniture didn’t take off, he took a job at a millwork company. There, he realized that while people might not pay thousands for a chair or a custom credenza, “they’re going to spend a ton of money on kitchen cabinets,” so his side hustle, Beauparlant Design, was born.
Philippe Beauparlant. After a short stint in project management and the birth of his first child in 2007, Mr. Beauparlant took the leap and made custom kitchens a full-time gig. And it worked.
However, this was during the “Gluckstein era” and he found himself designing cabinets with “traditional face frames, lots of mouldings. … It was 50 shades of beige,” he says with a laugh. In 2011, Mr. Beauparlant’s own Leslieville kitchen – definitely not beige – won top prize in the Design with Liebherr contest. This allowed Mr. Beauparlant to hire a few people and expanded permanently into whole-house interiors.
A few years later, the classic story of the creative becoming the administrator reared its ugly head, and Mr. Beauparlant’s health suffered. As Beauparlant Design reached the end of its life, the COVID-19 pandemic was also winding down.
Around this time, Mr. Beauparlant’s family of four entered an Airbnb contest to live in a house in Sicily for a year. While they didn’t win, the idea stayed with them, “and we moved there for 10 months,” Mr. Beauparlant says while brushing crumbs off his shirt.
“Now it is a marker in life. We always say, ‘Was this before or after Sicily? ’” As one might imagine, even with a gruelling schedule of “creative” home-schooling, shopping for local produce and the midday, seeds that were planted a long time ago grew in Mr. Beauparlant.
“When I was at Nienkamper, I can look back at journals, ideas I was writing down, and this idea of doing some kind of development was always in the back of my mind. ” Things had changed in Toronto, too, from the time he and his wife had purchased a laneway property in the Beaches neighbourhood in 2002 with the intent of developing it vis-à-vis the laneway suite bylaw amendment in 2018, the garden suite amendment in 2022, and the sixplex “as-of-right” in nine of Toronto’s 25 wards.
So, once again, Mr. Beauparlant took a leap of faith and created Home 05: Instrument for Living. But, “it has to align with the things that are important to me,” he says pensively.
“It can’t just be a transactional thing, so the cheapest built for the highest return; there has to be a balance. And I realized I have expensive tastes … maybe not the most expensive materials, but the way that they’re handled. ”Like his Liebherr kitchen, Home 05 maximizes square footage, features enormous windows, boasts sexy millwork and manipulates ordinary materials into something extraordinary.
To wit, to achieve a similar look to the “glossy terracotta” of the Paris 2024 Olympic Village, he’ll hack James Hardie cement board siding: “I’m going to chop it into two-foot segments so, proportionally, it looks like a brick … and pre-paint them three different shades and sheens. ” And large rear balconies for the three above-ground, two-bedroom units will allow for plenty of room to admire that siding . While balcony-less, the two basement units will feature large, sunken terraces. There is also the option to create a massive, front-facing, second balcony on some third-floor units.
Inside Home 05, Mr. Beauparlant has put his decades of design experience to good use: no wasted circulation space; a warm, timber ceiling, CLT floors and triple-pane windows mean quietude; energy efficiency carefully considered; in some units, lovely little architectural “moments” such as window seats; and all will feature larger-than-usual kitchens with luxury touches such as hidden pantries and appliance garages. He solved the design “puzzle,” he says, when his calculations revealed two things.
One, he’ll need a 30-foot-wide lot to make Home 05 work, and, two, he’ll eschew street-facing doors: “I’ve designed a lot of long and skinny homes in Toronto, and from a circulation perspective, it’s that corridor; it always eats up a lot of room. ” The financial puzzle has a few pieces missing , but he’s looked into potential lots in East York and, at an average cost of $900,000 and with construction costs between $3.4 to $3.5-million, he knows he won’t make much money, but “value comes from being able to build the second, third, and fourth building with greater efficiency and consistency.
” This, he writes on his website, is achieved by working within existing policies, replication of building components , reducing variables, and vertical integration.
“A lot of this is a theory,” Mr. Beauparlant admits. “But, for me, there’s a bigger upside to this than continuing to do private homes. It helps more people, it raises the bar in terms of what’s available as a two-bedroom rental. If you’re in Toronto’s east end, I will be signing copies of my new book, Hidden Toronto, at Coles at Eglinton Square on Sunday, June 7, from noon until 3 p.m. … June 7 also happens to be my birthday!
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